Themed collection Celebrating Soft Matter’s 10th Anniversary

In this Highlight, we review the stimuli-responsive electrorheological and magnetorheological performance of Pickering emulsion-polymerized core–shell structured particle based smart fluids.

We present strategies for temporal programming of self-assemblies in non-equilibrium systems following concepts of regulatory reaction networks, energy dissipation and kinetic control.

From micron-size droplets to soft robots to architectural structures, jamming is emerging as a new approach to control structural properties and dynamic response.

Considering topology among all polymer architectures polymer rings are unique, as they are the simplest closed structures without ends.

Charged polymer latexes can be produced in nonpolar solvents, and the variations used to control the charge have been reviewed.

By performing experiments on colloids, one can establish that certain definitions of the classical entropy fit the data, while others in the literature do not.

Master rheological spectra of our caramels over 12 orders of magnitude of frequency.

We combine confocal microscopy and rheological characterization to show that both percolation and liquid–gas phase separation are dynamically arrested states that support elastic stresses in a colloidal gel.

The emergence of meso-scale turbulence by division-induced active stresses in cellular monolayers.

Calcium induces a positive spontaneous curvature in negatively charged membranes, in a process completely screened by sodium.

Associative polymer gel mechanics in shear flow is studied using Smoluchowski equations to model the evolution of chain distributions, providing insight into the importance of chain end association kinetics, loop and bridge formation, and chain end tumbling on start-up of steady shear and subsequent relaxation.

The distribution of particle radius and refractive index for a sample of PDMS spheres. Each point represents the properties of one sphere. Most particles are clustered around a monodisperse peak. The distribution's tail reveals a population of particles that stopped growing prematurely.