When traveling on rough and unpredictable roads, the more legs the better — at least for robots. Balancing on two legs is somewhat hard; on four legs, it’s slightly easier. But what if you had many many legs, like a centipede?

There’s no artist more vibrant, spiritual, or creative than Mother Earth.

Researchers are exploring how active matter can be harnessed for tasks like designing new materials with tailored properties, understanding the behavior of biological organisms, and even developing new approaches to robotics and autonomous systems. But that’s only possible if scientists learn how the microscopic units making up active matter interact, and whether they can affect these interactions and thereby the collective properties of active matter on the macroscopic scale.