Soft Matter Blog

Soft Matter is delighted to offer a poster prize at the meeting “Pierre-Gille de Gennes days on Physics of cells: From soft to living matter” taking place 2^nd – 9^th September 2012, in Hyeres on the Mediterranean coast of France. 

The aim of the meeting is to bring together eminent researchers from interdisciplinary fields working on various aspects of cell and tissue biophysics including adhesion, mechanics, mechano-sensing, morphogenesis, transport, single molecule studies among others.

An advanced school, aimed at graduate students as well as researchers at the interface of biology with physical sciences, will precede the conference. Scientific sessions will include membranes, single molecules, adhesion and mechanics, cytoskeleton, gene expression, tissues and morphogenesis, bacterial motility, intracellular traffic, and emerging tools and techniques. 

More information is available on the meeting website: http://www.physcell2012.com

I have to inform you of a problem regarding issues 24-30 of volume 8 of Soft Matter.

Unfortunately, an error was made which has resulted in articles published in these seven issues having the wrong page numbers. We would like to apologise to our authors and readers and assure you that we are doing everything we can to rectify this error as quickly as possible.

We will be republishing the articles with the correct page numbers by 3^rd August and all authors of affected articles have been notified individually. The hard copies of the issues will be reprinted and distributed to our print subscribers. We will be publishing an appended addition and correction to each of the affected articles, as well as notices on the website to ensure readers are aware of the situation. We will also be coordinating with abstracting and indexing services such as ISI Web of Science and Scopus to make certain citations are not affected. Steps are also being put in place so this error cannot occur in the future.

We appreciate your patience and once again sincerely apologise for any inconvenience or confusion caused. If you wish to cite one of articles affected before the corrected version is published, please use the DOI.

If you would like to discuss this matter further, please do not hesitate to contact me.

Liz Davies
Editor, Soft Matter

Soft Matter is publishing a themed issue on the ‘Soft Matter Principles of Microfluidics’ with Professor Lydéric Bocquet (University of Lyon, France), Professor Todd Squires (University of California, Santa Barbara, USA) and Professor Annie Colin (Rhodia-Bordeaux1-CNRS, Bordeaux, France) acting as the guest editors.

Microfluidics has provided powerful experimental capabilities for the study of soft matter, and enabled experiments in this field that had previously been impossible.  Viewing clean-room microfabrication  facilities as an advanced machine shop — where your device literally emerges from your design — microfluidics enables unprecedented control over experimental conditions, such as flow types and rates in an experiment, the ability to heat and cool rapidly, to watch systems equilibrate or evolve physically or chemically, and to design an experiment to specifically isolate a particular scientific process or question. Furthermore, the small scale of microfluidic experiments enables systematic sweeps of many experimental systems, while consuming very little sample. Benefiting from fast thermal exchanges and a perfect control of residence time, microfluidics has provided new routes to process and tailor soft materials whose fabrication had been out of reach until only recently. Like the cell phone in your pocket, microfluidics has become an essential tool in most soft matter labs. It is therefore a proper time to draw a state-of-the-art picture of the intimate connections which have developed between soft matter and microfluidics: this is the aim of this themed issue Soft Matter: principles of microfluidics. By bringing together contributions from the various domains where ‘microfluidics meet soft matter’, we will obtain an impressionist view of the possibilities offered by microfluidics in soft matter and imagine the new avenues of this rapidly evolving field.

All manuscripts will be handled by the Soft Matter Editorial office and refereed in accordance to the standard procedures of the journal, and in this respect invited articles will be treated in the same way as regular submissions to the journal.

 The deadline for the receipt of manuscripts for this themed issue is: 21th April 2012

Manuscripts can be submitted using the RSC’s on-line submissions service. Please contact to the editorial office if you are interested in contributing to this issue. All contributions should state in the covering letter and “comments to editors” section during submission that the manuscript is submitted for the themed issue on Soft Matter Principles of Microfluidics.

To keep up-to-date with all the latest research, sign up for the Soft Matter e-Alert or RSS feeds or follow Soft Matter on Twitter or Facebook.

Founded by physical chemists like Flory and brought into the mainstream of theoretical physics by visionaries like de Gennes, over the last eighty years polymer physics has grown into a mature, rich, and exciting discipline. Now expanded to include also colloids, liquid crystals, interfaces, etc, polymer and soft matter physics span fundamental statistical mechanics and field theory, most advanced materials, as well as technological and biological frontiers. Nevertheless, a comprehensive exposition to fundamental concepts of polymer and soft matter science is still largely missing, neglected in most physics departments, ignored by many workers in biological realm, and underappreciated even by chemical engineers. The goal of this year’s Boulder summer school is to fill this gap and provide the physics community with a relatively comprehensive course in the fundamentals of polymer and soft matter physics with emphasis on their biological applications.

Scientific Coordinators
Alexander Grosberg, New York University
Michael Rubinstein, University of North Carolina
Eugenia Kumacheva, University of Toronto
Leo Radzihovsky, University of Colorado

Expected lecturers and seminar speakers
Paul Chaikin (New York),  Noel Clark (Boulder),  Alexei Finkelstein (Moscow),  Daan Frenkel (Cambridge),  Alexander Grosberg (New York),  Jean-Francois Joanny (Institute Curie),  Kurt Kremer (Mainz),  Eugenia Kumacheva (Toronto),  Frederick MacKintosh (Amsterdam),  Tom McLeish (Durham),  Philip Pincus (Santa Barbara),  David Pine (New York),  Michael Rubinstein (Chapel Hill),  Samuel Safran (Weizmann Institute),  David Weitz (Harvard),  Ekaterina Zhulina (Pittsburgh)

 
For further information please email: boulder.organizer2012@yale.edu or visit the Boulder summer school website.

Congratulations to Sharad Pasale for winning a Soft Matter poster prize at the recent 3rd International Congress on Biohydrogels.

Sharad Pasale’s winning poster was titled:

Synthesis of biodegradable and thermoresponsive hydrogel via RAFT polymerization and click chemistry for tissue engineering.

To keep up-to-date with all the latest research, sign up for the Soft Matter e-Alert or RSS feeds or follow Soft Matter on Twitter or Facebook.