Surface elastic instabilities, such as wrinkling and creasing, can enable a convenient strategy to impart reversible patterned topography to a surface. Here the classic system of a stiff layer on a soft substrate is focused, which famously produces parallel harmonic wrinkles at modest uniaxial compression that period-double repeatedly at higher compressions and ultimately evolve into deep folds and creases. By introducing micrometer-scale planar Bravais lattice holes to spatially pattern the substrate, these instabilities are guided into a wide variety of different patterns, including wrinkling in parallel bands and star shape bands, and radically reduce the threshold compression. The experimental patterns and thresholds are enabled to understand by considering a simple plane-strain model for the patterned substrate-deformation, decorated by wrinkling on the stiff surface layer. The experiments also show localized wrinkle-crease transitions at modest compression, yielding a hierarchical surface with different generations of instability mixed together. By varying the geometrical inputs, control over the stepwise evolution of surface morphologies is demonstrated. These results demonstrate considerable control over both the patterns and threshold of the surface elastic instabilities, and have relevance to many emerging applications of morphing surfaces, including in wearable/flexible electronics, biomedical systems, and optical devices.

The objective of this study is to explore the real-world effectiveness of various vaccine regimens to tackle the epidemic of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) Delta variant in Thailand during September–December 2021. We applied a test-negative case control study, using nationwide records of people tested for SARS-CoV-2. Each case was matched with two controls with respect to age, detection date, and specimen collection site. A conditional logistic regression was performed. Results were presented in the form vaccine effectiveness (VE) and 95% confidence interval. A total of 1,460,458 observations were analyzed. Overall, the two-dose heterologous prime-boost, ChAdOx1 + BNT162b2 and CoronaVac + BNT162b2, manifested the largest protection level (79.9% (74.0–84.5%) and 74.7% (62.8–82.8%)) and remained stable over the whole study course. The three-dose schedules (CoronaVac + CoronaVac + ChAdOx1, and CoronaVac + CoronaVac + BNT162b2) expressed very high degree of VE estimate (above 80.0% at any time interval). Concerning severe infection, almost all regimens displayed very high VE estimate. For the two-dose schedules, heterologous prime-boost regimens seemed to have slightly better protection for severe infection relative to homologous regimens. Campaigns to expedite the rollout of third-dose booster shot should be carried out. Heterologous prime-boost regimens should be considered as an option to enhance protection for the entire population.

Liquid crystalline elastomers combine the ordering properties of liquid crystals with elasticity of crosslinked polymer networks. In monodomain (permanently aligned) elastomers, altering the orientational (nematic) order causes changes in the equilibrium sample length, which is the basis of the famous effect of large-amplitude reversible mechanical actuation. The stimulus for this effect could be a change in temperature, or illumination by light in photosensitized elastomers, but equally the nematic order changes by mixing with a solvent. This work theoretically investigates a competition between the spontaneous contraction on swelling of a monodomain nematic elastomer and the externally imposed stretching. We find that this competition leads to bistability in the system and allows a two-phase separation between a nematic state with lower swelling and an isotropic state with higher solvent concentration. We calculated the conditions in which the instability occurs as well as the mechanical and geometric parameters of equilibrium states. Being able to predict how this instability arises will provide opportunities for exploiting nematic elastomer filaments.

A long cylindrical cavity through a soft solid forms a soft microfluidic channel, or models a vascular capillary. We observe experimentally that, when such a channel bears a pressurized fluid, it first dilates homogeneously, but then becomes unstable to a peristaltic elastic instability. We combine theory and numerics to fully characterize the instability in a channel through a bulk neo-Hookean solid, showing that instability occurs supercritically with wavelength 2π/k = 12.278....a when the pressure exceeds 2.052....µ. In finite solids, the threshold pressure is reduced, and peristalsis is followed by a second instability which shears the peristaltic shape breaking axisymmetry. These instabilities shows that, counterintuitively, if a pipe runs through a bulk solid, the bulk solid can be destabilizing rather than stabilizing at high pressures. They also offers a route to fabricate periodically undulating channels, producing waveguides with photonic/phononic stop bands. arXiv:1805.02998v1 [cond-mat.soft]

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