Category: BUYSEMPERFI

“There are companies that have partnerships and collaborations, but they’re all still in development,” claims Berdichevsky, “while we’re ready for scale production manufacturing.”

Not coincidentally, Moses Lake is also home to REC Silicon, a formerly shuttered supplier to the photovoltaics industry, and now one of only two US makers of silane gas. Group14 will be sourcing locally; Berdichevsky preferred not to say where Sila is sourcing its silane. Both companies received federal grants of $100 million to build their silicon anode factories.

Jay Turner, an environmental studies professor at Wellesley College, tells WIRED that large-scale domestic manufacturing of new EV battery technologies is understandably a big deal. “It marks an important break with history,” says the battery historian who tracks new North American EV production.

“In the past, the US has been a leader in advanced battery research, but much of the actual manufacturing has taken place abroad. It is exciting to see US-developed research being scaled at US factories. Sila and Group14 both look well positioned to scale.”

Power Players

However, they are just two of the silicon anode producers in the US. Californian companies OneD Battery Sciences and Amprius grow silicon nanowires that they claim are less prone to swelling than nano silicon powders.

Amprius, founded in 2008 by Stanford materials science professor Yi Cui, has focused on silicon anodes for the aviation sector, while OneD Battery Sciences will be putting its silicon nanotechnology into GM’s Ultium batteries.

Instead of engineering silicon nanoparticles or nanowires, Enevate, also of California, deposits nanoscale silicon films directly onto copper foil. Its silicon anode batteries are already used in electric motorbikes.

Chicago startup NanoGraf makes a silicon oxide material for anodes that it pre-swells for stability. Its anodes are used in military electronics.

Developers of other battery chemistries are looking to supplant traditional lithium-ion completely. Tesla is already producing cars with lithium-iron-phosphate batteries; Toyota has teased industry insiders with its solid-state batteries; Chinese firms are developing sodium-ion (Na-ion) technologies that require little to no lithium, nickel, or cobalt; and Samsung SDI is perfecting high-manganese batteries.

There could well be room for all the above in a growing global EV market. Indeed, the UK’s Advanced Propulsion Centre, a specialist in emerging battery technologies, says this shift in electric tech is “not about one type [of battery chemistry] winning over the other, as the performance characteristics mean that user cases vary.”

A smartwatch is designed to make your life easier and get you off your phone. Every time you have to dig your phone out of your pocket to read a notification, a digital fairy dies. However, a smartwatch is also less useful if you have to drop whatever you’re doing to squint and poke your finger at a tiny screen. In October, Apple debuted Double Tap in WatchOS 10.1. If you own a Series 9 or a Watch Ultra 2, you can now quickly tap the index and thumb of your watch hand to perform the primary action on your watch.

To develop Double Tap for the masses, Apple took learnings from the company’s accessibility feature, AssistiveTouch, which lets users switch to gesture-based controls. This leap was also enabled in part by the more efficient S9 SiP chip and a new four-core Neural Engine in the new watches. These features let the watch process data from the accelerometer, gyroscope, and optical heart rate sensor with a machine-learning algorithm to detect minute changes in blood flow as you move your fingers.

If you’ve ever been walking, running, or biking and wanted to quickly check a text without dropping everything in your hands, Double Tap could come in handy. Here’s how to use it.

Is My Watch Compatible?

WatchOS 10.1 is compatible with Watch Series 4 and later. You also need an iPhone XS or later that is running iOS 17. It’s automatically enabled on the Watch Series 9 and Watch Ultra 2.

How to Turn On Double Tap

Photograph: Apple

To check if your watch is running it, open Settings > Gestures > Double Tap to enable or disable it. In the Double Tap menu, you can select if you want Double Tap to play/pause your music or skip, and whether you want Double Tap to advance your Smart Stack or select.

It is worth noting here that Double Tap isn’t the first iteration of gesture-based controls on the Apple Watch. If you think you might like a few more gestures, you must first turn Double Tap off. Go to Settings > Accessibility > AssistiveTouch. Turn on Hand Gestures.

You can assign different controls to Tap, Double Tap, Clench, or Double Clench. For example, you can assign Action Menu to Double Clench. Unlike Double Tap, AssistiveTouch is intended for people with mobility issues who may need help turning the tiny digital crown.

How to Use Double Tap

Video: Apple

Double Tap works in most Apple Watch apps. However, there are a few exceptions:

• Double Tap does not work with the ECG, Heart Rate, or Blood Oxygen features, or while the Sleep Focus is on.
• You can use Double Tap to start a workout session if your watch sent you an automatic workout reminder. However, you cannot use Double Tap to stop in the middle of an active workout session.
• You can’t use Double Tap with Walkie-Talkie, Maps, or Mindfulness while those apps are active. You also can’t trigger SOS features, like Emergency SOS, Fall Detection, or Crash Detection.

Double Tap works as the primary action button in most apps. You can use Double Tap to open and scroll through your Smart Stack, pause timers, take a picture with the Camera Remote app, or pause music.

YouTube unleashed an influential generation of new internet celebrities in 2007 when it started to share ad revenue with select video creators. For the past couple of years, a snippet of code on YouTube’s website revealed which channels are part of the secretive and exclusive club. But users and activists who had come to rely on that flag suddenly found themselves in the dark last month.

YouTube removed the code, shutting off the ability of creators to keep tabs on their competitors—and of journalists and researchers to hold the world’s largest video streaming service accountable for who it allows into what’s known as the YouTube Partner Program, or YPP. Its demise hasn’t been previously reported.

Being part of YPP can be a validation of creators’ talents, but the uncertainty left by the code’s removal could let both new joiners and kicked-out creators escape attention. In September, YouTube announced that UK comedian Russell Brand had been suspended from YPP after several women accused him of rape and sexual assault. Now, it’s more difficult to track a channel’s status.

Maen Hammad says he and his colleagues at the US corporate responsibility advocacy group Ekō used the code on YouTube channels and tools empowered by it to carry out their investigations. The nonprofit previously used the flag to report on anti-LGBTQ content receiving revenue from YouTube. “I would have to believe that YouTube took out the source code after many civil society groups were using them to corroborate that YouTube was monetizing some of the worst disinformation on the internet,” Hammad says.

Tony Woodall, who runs a travel channel that he hopes will soon meet the viewership requirements to join YPP, made use of YouTube’s transparency about accounts in the program in recent months. He used the Google Chrome extension Is YouTube Channel Monetized?, which was powered by the code snippet, to research and learn from the strategies of other travel accounts already in YPP. “YouTube creators like to know which other creators are getting monetized and ask, ‘Why not me?’” Woodall says. He now feels deflated—the extension has stopped working, and no clear alternatives are available.

Asked about the vanished code, YouTube spokesperson Kimberly Taylor says the service constantly makes updates to improve the privacy of creators and viewers. While ads appear on a variety of videos and channels, just those in YPP get a portion of sales. Whether someone is earning ad revenue share is a fact YouTube intends to keep private with the channel owner, Taylor says.

Google violated antitrust laws through deals that stifled competition for its Play mobile app store, a jury in San Francisco unanimously found today. The verdict delivers the first significant US courtroom loss for big tech in the years-long campaign by rivals, regulators, and prosecutors to tame the power of internet gatekeepers.

The lawsuit next moves to a remedies phase, meaning a judge as soon as the coming weeks will hear arguments about and decide whether to order changes to Google’s business practices. Users of devices powered by Google’s Android operating system could find more app options to choose from, at lower prices, if Google is forced to allow downloads of rival app stores from Play or share a greater portion of sales with developers selling digital items inside their apps.

The ruling came in a case first filed in 2020 by Epic Games, known for its blockbuster game Fortnite and tools for developers, and argued before a jury since early November. The jury of nine—a tenth juror dropped out early in the trial—deliberated for three hours before reaching its verdict. They faced 11 questions such as defining product and geographic markets and whether Google engaged in anticompetitive conduct in those areas.

Epic had accused Google of restricting smartphone makers, wireless carriers, and app developers from providing any competition to the Play store, which accounts for over 95 percent of all downloads onto Android phones in the US.

Google had denied any wrongdoing, saying that its sole aim was to provide a safe and attractive experience to users, especially as it faced competition from Apple, its iPhone, and its App Store.

Google and Epic did not have immediate comment.

This is a developing story. Check back for updates.

Two surveillance bills are barreling their way through the US House of Representatives this week. Both claim to achieve roughly the same goal—enact sweeping reforms and save a dying surveillance program beleaguered by “persistent and widespread” abuse.

Under this program, Section 702, the United States government collects hundreds of millions of phone calls, emails, and text messages each year. An inestimable chunk belongs to American citizens, permanent residents, and others in the United States neither suspected nor accused of any crime.

While both bills would extend the program’s life, only one of them can credibly lay claim to the title of reform. Legislation introduced last week by Representative Andy Biggs in the House Judiciary Committee would require the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to obtain warrants before accessing the communications of Americans collected under Section 702. The second bill, introduced by the House Intelligence Committee, contains no equivalent protection. In fact, its authors are vehemently opposed to it.

Judiciary’s Protect Liberty and End Warrantless Surveillance Act—or PLEWSA, unfortunately—secures a glaring loophole in US law that helps police and intelligence agencies buy their way around the Fourth Amendment, paying US companies for information that they’d otherwise demand a warrant to disclose. The House intelligence bill—the FISA Reform and Reauthorization Act, or FRRA–also does nothing to address this privacy threat.

What FRRA does appear to do, despite its name, is explode the number of companies the US government may compel to cooperate with wiretaps under Section 702. That was the assessment on Friday of Marc Zwillinger, amicus curiae to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review (FISCR). “These changes would vastly widen the scope of businesses, entities, and their affiliates who are eligible to be compelled to assist 702 surveillance,” Zwillinger wrote in an article with Steve Lane, a former Justice Department (DOJ) attorney.

Section 702 currently allows the government to compel a class of companies called “electronic communications providers” to collect communications. If the FRRA becomes law, according to Zwillinger, that category would be greatly expanded to include a slew of new businesses, including “data centers, colocation providers, business landlords, shared workspaces,” as well as, he says, “hotels where guests connect to the internet.”

Congressional sources tell WIRED that officials at the DOJ, Department of Defense, and National Security Agency have been placing urgent calls directly to House lawmakers to oppose PLEWSA and advance the FRRA; an effort, the sources say, being coordinated by White House advisors. Privately, some Democrats have been urged to help kill the “Jim Jordan bill,” an aide said, explaining the apparent jab is meant to frame an entirely bipartisan bill as an extreme Republican measure. (Jordan, the aide noted, is not the bill’s author and did not introduce it.) Regardless, a major chunk of PLEWSA was cannibalized from privacy legislation with a record of broad bipartisan support, particularly in the Senate where top Democrat Chuck Schumer has previously lent his name to a bill banning police and intelligence agencies from buying people’s personal data.

Taylor Swift remains inescapable. Tales of her reign are legion, as are her fans. Next to Beyoncé, her power and influence have reached heights so unbridled it’s almost unfathomable. Her Eras Tour made nearly a billion dollars in 2023, and the concert film of that tour has brought in nearly $250 million worldwide. When rumors started swirling in the fall that she was dating Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, they upended American football. Still, when Time named her Person of the Year, conspiracy theorists saw only one explanation. They allege Swift is a psyop.

If you’ve lived on the internet long enough, you will have heard this kind of thing before. Back in 2016, when she was largely apolitical in her public life, Swift was a hero of the so-called alt-right who some believed was actually red-pilling America to further a racist, conservative agenda. When she piped up about politics in 2018, some people online (somewhat jokingly) theorized she’d been replaced by an NPC. The latest twist? “The regime has plans to weaponize her just in time for 2024,” the @EndWokeness account posted on X Wednesday, adding that if you didn’t find this plausible “you clearly have not been paying attention.”

@EndWokeness has 1.9 million followers, and, as of Monday morning, the post had more than 788,000 views. On Telegram, a QAnon influencer account posted that “we need to wake the next generation up to the occult forces colluding with their favorite celebrities.” Right-wing commentator Jack Posobiec posted on X that “the Taylor Swift girlboss psyop has been fully activated.”

Last week’s Person of the Year honor was also followed by resurfaced allegations that Swift is performing witchcraft to further her success and that the left is using her to influence the 2024 US presidential election. Stephen Miller, a senior adviser during Donald Trump’s presidency, posted a message on X saying that “what’s happening with Taylor Swift is not organic.”

All of this happened the same week WIRED reporter David Gilbert published an investigation into a pro-Russia campaign that used fake Swift quotes in a series of Facebook and X posts attempting to seed anti-Ukraine sentiment, reinforcing—in a totally different way—that celebrity is a powerful tool for manipulation. A few days later, Microsoft researchers revealed a similar effort by an unknown Russian group to alter Cameo videos by celebs like Elijah Wood and Mike Tyson to make it look like they were being critical of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky.

Swift exists as a unique example of the intersection of celebrity and politics, and how it operates globally, says Jonathan Dean, a professor of politics at the University of Leeds. “An important feature of culture and politics over the past 10 years, certainly in the UK and the US and I think probably more broadly as well, is that there’s been a significant convergence in the grammar and style and mode, if you like, of pop culture fandom and political citizenship,” he says, referencing the similar ways fandoms and political parties can operate. “Taylor Swift is interesting in that sense because I think she’s a real embodiment of those convergences.”

Similarly, third-party options that are smaller, bigger, or unorthodox shapes can be better for players than adaptive controllers and avoid the steep costs associated with them. “That kind of cheap entry point might not be something many think of as accessibility,” Dale continues. “But weird unofficial controllers with just the right mix of features are a big reason I was able to game in my teens.”

With accessibility being pulled into the orbit of proprietary controllers, however, solutions—if they remain viable—are lost behind a paywall erected by the Access controller and its peers.

Worse, focusing on adaptive controllers can mask other ways we should be mitigating the cost of accessibility. When Todd Howard placed the onus on the XAC when pressed on accessibility in Starfield, he exemplified how easy it is to lose sight of the importance of software level accessibility.

If we buy a game only to find it inaccessible, that in itself represents a wasted expense. But this extends to making hardware more accessible and, in particular, more customizable on a software level. How much more? “Ultimately, as customizable as possible,” Kraft says. “If on the Xbox there were so many options for customizing the way your controllers and your XAC worked that it was just overwhelming, then you might have a reduction in the amount of people that need other things.”

Nor should we ignore the information vacuum that accompanies accessible hardware. “To improve the cost of accessibility disabled gamers need a range of choices and an easier way to research and access different accessible solutions,” says Gohil. Something that, arguably, Sony and Microsoft should be doing more to mitigate.

Fortunately, it can also be addressed without them. The onus is currently on charities to do so when a well-resourced, affiliated, and platform agnostic organization would be better-equipped. “A really good fit for this would be somebody like Epic, who has the Unreal engine,” he says. “You have games on the Unreal engine that are going onto PlayStation, that are going on a Nintendo, that are going into Xbox, PC.”

It may sound like a small thing, but simply knowing what’s out there and what it does can stop players wasting money on solutions inappropriate to their experiences. Still, even these specific solutions need to be part of a wider, diverse, and affordable landscape of accessible hardware and not looked upon as ultimate solutions to the high costs of accessibility. Something made exponentially more difficult by the potential of the focus being placed on the idea of a single solution—even if, in an ideal world, we had a cross-party adaptive controller.

None of this should suggest the Access controller isn’t a welcome addition to accessible hardware solutions, but nor should we consider it a panacea to videogame inaccessibility. With its $90 price tag, it does little to mitigate the current cost of accessible hardware, especially as it and other adaptive controllers are brute forced into the position of being the only solution for their consoles.

It’s something that has the potential not just to limit the options for players but also slow down the reduction of costs that remain prohibitive, pushed into inertia by the recommended retail price of proprietary devices. In so doing, stagnating the impressive progress we’ve seen in the last few years and further punishing players with steep costs, simply for being disabled. For, as Gohil says, for all the issues in accessibility, “the increasing financial pinch on disabled gamers is a key factor making gaming inaccessible.”

A big hurdle to enjoying these games today is the wide array of console types available on the used market. Some games require obscure upgrades or special RAM-filled cards to play. Some games are only on CD, and not every PC Engine model has a CD drive. There’s also the added annoyance of titles being locked to one geographical region. That’s what Analogue is hoping to eliminate with the Duo—its mission is to play every game, every type, every region, no muss, no fuss. Analogue arranged for me to borrow a bunch of titles across CD-ROMs and cards, and as someone with little exposure to the PC Engine and its derivatives, I was shocked. While these games can be brutally hard in the way only old video games are, they can also be so much fun.

From what I experienced, the PC Engine and TurboGrafx-16 games feature punchy colors and high-quality animations of onscreen characters. I cackled when caveboy Bonk, the star of Bonk’s Big Adventure, grew to fill a quarter of the screen and went nuts after scarfing down a hunk of meat. (I’ve arrived at the opinion that Bonk is leagues more charming than milquetoast Mario and less of a tryhard than edgy Gen-Xer Sonic.) In Parasol Stars, I inexplicably scooped up (??) and flung (???) animals, musical instruments, balls of water, lightning bolts, and whatever else was around with an umbrella (!), and had a blast doing it. I have no idea what this game is about, but it’s a hoot and a half.

CD-ROM titles like the role-player Ys III and space shooter R-Type Complete hold up surprisingly well, with cool animated intro sequences, snippets of voice-over, and incredible, god-tier synthesized soundtracks. These early ’90s games can be a whole aesthetic experience.

All of these games are made to look and sound their best by the Duo, but if you don’t want them at their best, you can make them look worse. By default, the console uses a “pixel perfect” interpretation to upscale games, and it looks great for cartoony games, letting you appreciate the time and care that went into every element. Then there are three novelty display filters—a pair that degrade the image to look like the different portable variants of the console, and one that tries to simulate the look of a Sony Trinitron tube TV. I didn’t love the portable looks, but the Trinitron look is stunning—especially for dark, moody titles.

As someone who prefers handheld gaming so I don’t hog the whole TV with my sessions, the layout and selection of ports on the Duo was greatly appreciated. With HDMI-out, I was able to hook up a computer monitor to the system. Thanks to the Duo’s 3.5-mm headphone jack and volume wheel, I could plug nice headphones straight to the box. This meant I could play at my desk, with sound, for hours on end.

Fake It Till You Make It

Unfortunately, the weak point of the whole system is its software, AnalogueOS. It has a simple text-based menu system (just like on the Analogue Pocket), but the Duo has some missing features out of the gate. For now, Analogue Duo can’t complete instant saves within games, which means you’ll have to tough out some truly unforgiving boss battles that send you back to the very beginning of the game every time you die. You can nab screenshots, tweak the display settings, and get a little information about each title you insert, but it feels bare-bones at launch. One feature that’s unsupported on the Duo is openFPGA, which lets Analogue Pocket users load all sorts of software “cores” onto their handhelds, encouraging developers to make the handheld compatible with a ton of additional systems. It’s safe to assume that Duo will never be able to play games beyond those made for the PC Engine and TurboGrafx-16.

The physical design of Analogue Duo has some quirks too. The port for the original-style controllers is all the way around one side of the Duo instead of smack dab on the front like on the original NEC-built hardware, making it inconvenient to access. Also, the slim, front-facing game slot covers up most of the artwork on cartridges—maybe not a huge deal, but it was a feature of the original hardware that’s missing from this modern recreation. (For what it’s worth, many American games had ho-hum text on the front instead of splashy art.)

Plastic Love

Photograph: Analogue

Diving into the past with the Analogue Duo, I can’t help but be struck by the legacy of the PC Engine. By letting collectors play American and Japanese games on a rock-solid piece of hardware, Analogue is giving this underappreciated system a new lease on life. For American TurboGrafx-16 fans, and perhaps especially gamers in Japan with hoards of games waiting to be revisited, Analogue Duo makes it dead easy to plug in and revisit old favorites, all while making them look better than ever.

Let’s be clear: Collecting and playing old video games is an expensive hobby for the privileged. Maybe you wanted to import a PC Engine, CD drive, some games, and some controllers (and multi-tap—you’re not playing alone are you?)—you would be out hundreds of dollars. If you want to shore up that old console and fix leaky capacitors and busted CD drive gears and get it outputting HD-grade video, stack a few more Benjamins on top. A competing modern console, the Polymega, can play most of the same games, but it costs more than a PlayStation 5. In that context, with all its quirks and key software features yet to come, the $250 Analogue Duo seems like a decent deal.

Part time machine, part media preservation effort, the Analogue Duo will impress its niche audience even more than it impressed me. Dust off your Tatsuro Yamashita cassettes and rev up the Toyota Sera—the creative spirit of Japan’s Bubble Era is still alive in the exquisitely ’90s games of the PC Engine.

The new fundraising appeal comes amid a certain “tiredness” from donors, as Ukraine’s finance minister put it. Yaroslava Gres, United24’s main coordinator, says overcoming that fatigue is his mission. “We ask ourselves: What will motivate them to keep standing with Ukraine?” he tells WIRED.

Gres says he hopes that letting prospective donors see the homes they will help rebuild, and hear from the people who want to return home, will inspire the support to keep coming. “Storytelling gives our donors an opportunity to feel complicity with the specific people they support, as well as with the specific targets they help rebuild,” he says.

The 3D renderings come via LUN, a Ukrainian realty website that partnered with United24 for the project. The company dispatched photographers, equipped with drones, to buildings across the country. The footage is used to create a digital replica of a damaged building. From there, its architects plot the reconstruction of the building.

“We have been digitizing the future for years, modeling how cities can develop, and how new buildings can be built,” a LUN spokesperson tells WIRED. “It was difficult to see destruction instead; to look through hundreds of photos of the damage dealt and depict everything as is.”

Video: United24

These 3D renderings will also be made available through augmented reality, letting users picture the buildings through their phone camera or AR headset.

The logistics behind rebuilding Ukraine’s civil infrastructure is going to be enormous and complicated. In a presentation delivered in May, Maksym Smilianets—co-owner of Ukrainian internet service provider Viner—highlighted the magnitude of the problem they face in rebuilding and reconnecting the country. The air strikes and shelling did an enormous amount of damage to the telecommunications infrastructure, he explained. Hundreds of kilometers of fiber-optic cable have already been laid to repair that destruction.

In the areas currently under Russian control, the invading army quickly switched the connection to the Moscow-controlled internet. “They rebuilt the connections and stole our equipment,” Smilianets’ presentation explained. In the liberated parts of Ukraine, repair crews found boobytraps inside the telecommunications infrastructure, he said. “They did everything possible for total disconnection.”

Even as ISPs like Smilianets’ Viner work to rebuild the shared infrastructure of Ukraine, once one of the best-connected countries in Europe, there will be enormous work required to reconnect each damaged home and apartment block across the country. That “last mile” will likely require hundreds of kilometers more fiber-optic cable.

“No one has the power to cleanse the depths of human nature from the evil that sometimes rises to the surface and destroys and kills,” Ukrainian president Voldomyr Zelensky told the Ukraine Recovery Conference held in London this past June. “But you and I, and right now, we are able to protect life and overcome the ruins.”

“It was pretty amazing how well the experimental data and numerical simulation matched,” Eckert said. In fact, it matched so closely that Carenza’s first response was that it must be wrong. The team jokingly worried that a peer reviewer might think they’d cheated. “It really was that beautiful,” Carenza said.

The observations answer a “long-standing question about the type of order present in tissues,” said Joshua Shaevitz, a physicist at Princeton University who reviewed the paper (and did not think they’d cheated). Science often “gets murky,” he said, when data points to seemingly conflicting truths—in this case, the nested symmetries. “Then someone points out or shows that, well, those things aren’t so distinct. They’re both right.”

Form, Force, and Function

Accurately defining a liquid crystal’s symmetry isn’t just a mathematical exercise. Depending on its symmetry, a crystal’s stress tensor—a matrix that captures how a material deforms under stress—looks different. This tensor is the mathematical link to the fluid dynamics equations Giomi wanted to use to connect physical forces and biological functions.

Bringing the physics of liquid crystals to bear on tissues is a new way to understand the messy, complicated world of biology, Hirst said.

The precise implications of the handoff from hexatic to nematic order aren’t yet clear, but the team suspects that cells may exert a degree of control over that transition. There’s even evidence that the emergence of nematic order has something to do with cell adhesion, they said. Figuring out how and why tissues manifest these two interlaced symmetries is a project for the future—although Giomi is already working on using the results to understand how cancer cells flow through the body when they metastasize. And Shaevitz noted that a tissue’s multiscale liquid crystallinity could be related to embryogenesis—the process by which embryos mold themselves into organisms.

If there’s one central idea in tissue biophysics, Giomi said, it’s that structure gives rise to forces, and forces give rise to functions. In other words, controlling multiscale symmetry could be part of how tissues add up to more than the sum of their cells.

There’s “a triangle of form, force, and function,” Giomi said. “Cells use their shape to regulate forces, and these in turn serve as the running engine of mechanical functionality.”

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Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent publication of the Simons Foundation whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research developments and trends in mathematics and the physical and life sciences.