Water excites intense controversy among researchers. Its crucial role in the natural and biological world is unquestioned but much of the agreement stops [1] when it comes to details. In particular, how water behaves at interfaces is a central mystery. Some interfaces are hydrophobic [2], but here we are interested in polar surfaces, which attract water. This situation is common in the natural ...

Red blood cells play a major role in body metabolism by supplying oxygen from the microvasculature to different organs and tissues. Understanding blood flow properties in microcirculation is an essential step towards elucidating fundamental and practical issues. Numerical simulations of a blood model under a confined linear shear flow reveal that confinement markedly modifies the properties of ...

Empirical potential-based quasi-continuum theory (EQT) provides a route to incorporate atomistic detail into continuum framework such as the Nernst-Planck equation. EQT can also be used to construct a grand potential functional for classical density functional theory (cDFT). The combination of EQT and cDFT provides a simple and fast approach to predict the inhomogeneous density, potential profi...

Biological macromolecules, living in the confines of a cell, often adopt conformations that are unlikely to occur in free space. In this paper, we investigate the effects of confinement on the shape of a semiflexible chain. Results of Monte Carlo simulations show the existence of a shape transition when the persistence length of the polymer becomes comparable to the dimensions of the box. An or...

Prolonged human spaceflight to another planet or an asteroid will introduce unique challenges of mitigating the risk of infection. During space travel, exposure to microgravity, radiation, and stress alter human immunoregulatory responses, which can in turn impact an astronaut's ability to prevent acquisition of infectious agents or reactivation of latent infection. In addition, microgravity af...

Synthetic microswimmers are envisioned to be useful in numerous applications, many of which occur in tightly confined spaces. It is therefore important to understand how confinement influences swimmer dynamics. Here we study the motility of bimetallic microswimmers in linear and curved channels. Our experiments show swimmer velocities increase, up to 5 times, with the degree of confinement, and...

The aim of our research is to develop a theory, which can predict the behavior of confined fluids in nanoslit pores. The nanoslit pores studied in this work consist of two structureless and parallel walls in the xy plane located at 0 = z and H z = , in equilibrium with a bulk homogeneous fluid at the same temperature and at a given uniform bulk density. We have derived the following general equ...

Fluids confined in nanopores are ubiquitous nature and technology. In recent years, the interest fluids has grown, driven by research on unconventional hydrocarbon resources—shale gas shale oil, much of which nanopores. When nanopores, many their properties differ from those same fluid bulk. These include density, freezing point, transport coefficients, thermal expansion coefficient, elastic pr...