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Odd dynamics of living chiral crystals | Nature

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Experiments show that swimming starfish embryos spontaneously assemble into large chiral crystals that exhibit self-sustained chiral oscillations and unconventional deformation responses characteristic of odd elastic materials.

Subjects Biological physics Statistical physics, thermodynamics and nonlinear dynamics Abstract Active crystals are highly ordered structures that emerge from the self-organization of motile objects, and have been widely studied in synthetic 1 , 2 and bacterial 3 , 4 active matter. Whether persistent crystalline order can emerge in groups of autonomously developing multicellular organisms is currently unknown. Here we show that swimming starfish embryos spontaneously assemble into chiral crystals that span thousands of spinning organisms and persist for tens of hours. Combining experiments, th

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