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Respiratory viruses such as coronavirus spread from person to person through droplets of saliva or mucus. Face masks decrease the dissemination of such droplets and thereby minimize viral propagation from someone who may be contagious. Mucus did not evolve, though, to help pathogens spread. Quite the opposite.
Mucus arose early in the evolution of multicellular animals to exclude undesirable bacteria from body tissues, a primitive type of immunity. The cooperation between cilia* and mucus also helped prevent aquatic organisms from being smothered by sediments and enabled them to clean or collect particulate matter from their exteriors. Producing mucus was likely a prerequisite for evolution of the gut and of the types of respiratory organs necessary for terrestrial life. Today, mucus protects the large, exposed interior surfaces of our respiratory and gastrointestinal tracts from bacteria, viruses, parasites, and chemical/physical hazards.
But what material is mucus? Mucus is a hydrogel made of heavily glycosylated protein molecules called “mucins,” each of which is nearly 3 megadaltons in size. Individual giant mucin molecules are disulfide bonded to one another, generating an extended mesh. Using cryo-electron microscopy and X-ray crystallography, we have discovered the three-dimensional structure of mucins and gained insight into the mechanism by which they assemble step-wise into hydrogels.
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* cell-surface, rope-like structures that beat in coordinated waves

TBA

Zoom Lecture: : https://weizmann.zoom.us/j/91487772614

Structural superlubricity may provide a viable route to the reduction of friction and wear. In this talk I will present results of fully atomistic numerical simulations of static and dynamical properties of graphite/hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN) heterojunctions, performed adopting a recently developed inter-layer potential. We found that structural superlubricity at interfaces between graphite and h-BN persists even for the aligned contacts sustaining external loads. A negative friction coefficient, where friction is reduced upon increasing normal load, is predicted. It is demonstrated that further control over the physical properties of 2D layered materials can be gained via tuning the aspect-ratio of nanoribbons. The sliding dynamics of the edge-pulled nanoribbons is found to be determined by the interplay between in-plane ribbon elasticity and interfacial lattice mismatch. Our results are expected to be of general nature and should be applicable to other van der Waals heterostructures.

Individuals differ substantially in their attitudes to uncertainty: some avoid is at all costs, while others are tolerant of, or even seek, uncertainty. These differences are important, because uncertainty is everywhere – how we cope with uncertainty can have significant implications for our mental health and quality of life. I will describe a series of studies in which we characterize individual differences in decision-making under uncertainty, and use these characterizations to study the neural mechanisms of decision-making under uncertainty and variations in these mechanisms in mental illness.