The hidden wheel-within
There is this old, eternal question: Why don’t animals have wheels? In this perspective, we show that they actually do, and they do so in a physically extraordinary way - by combining incompatible elasticity, differential geometry and dissipative self-organization. Nature's wheel - the “wheel-w...
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| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Article (Journal) |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
17 Feb 2026
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| In: |
Soft matter
Year: 2026, Volume: 22, Issue: 14, Pages: 2597-2607 |
| ISSN: | 1744-6848 |
| DOI: | 10.1039/D5SM01041A |
| Online Access: | Verlag, kostenfrei, Volltext: https://doi.org/10.1039/D5SM01041A Verlag, kostenfrei, Volltext: https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2026/sm/d5sm01041a 
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| Author Notes: | Falko Ziebert and Igor M. Kulić |
| Summary: | There is this old, eternal question: Why don’t animals have wheels? In this perspective, we show that they actually do, and they do so in a physically extraordinary way - by combining incompatible elasticity, differential geometry and dissipative self-organization. Nature's wheel - the “wheel-within” - has been mysteriously concealed in plain sight, yet it spins in virtually every slender-body organism: in falling cats, crocodilians spinning to subdue their prey, rolling fruit-fly larvae, circumnutating plants and even in some of our own body movements. Flying somehow under the radar of our cognition, in recent years, the wheel-within also tacitly entered the field of soft robotics, finally opening our eyes to its ubiquitous role in Nature. We here identify its underlying physical ingredients, namely the existence of a neutrally stable, shape-invariant and actively driven elastic mode. We then reflect on various man-made realizations of the wheel-within and outline where it could be spinning from here. |
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| Item Description: | Zuerst veröffentlicht: 17. Februar 2026 Gesehen am 30.04.2026 |
| Physical Description: | Online Resource |
| ISSN: | 1744-6848 |
| DOI: | 10.1039/D5SM01041A |