Congratulations to Siamak Mirfendereski, who led the work and is on the job market this year; please find him at AIChE this year.

Perhaps we can take inspiration from the imperfect beauty of natural systems and maybe even use these imperfections to impart functionality someday.

Analogy: Painting fish skin with watercolors results in blurry boundaries (classical Turing theory). Outlining watercolor with a Sharpie yields sharper patterns (prior work). Using sticky dots to paint increases the likelihood of imperfections, mimicking reality (this work).

Hot off the press 🔥. We report imperfect Turing patterns of hard spheres diffusiophoretically assembling to chemical signals, enabling us to get imperfections such as packing limits, variation in thickness, and pattern breakups. @cp-matter.bsky.social
authors.elsevier.com/a/1l-tf9Cyxd...

We're delighted to announce that Ankur Gupta has been selected as the recipient of the 2025 Soft Matter Lectureship!

This award honours an early-career researcher for their contributions to the soft matter field.

Learn more about Ankur and his research on our blog 👉 blogs.rsc.org/sm/2025/09/1...