Search for: All records

Across mammalia, brain morphology follows specific scaling patterns. Bigger bodies have bigger brains, with surface area outpacing volume growth, resulting in increased foldedness. We have recently studied scaling rules of cortical thickness, both local and global, finding that the cortical thickness difference between thick gyri and thin sulci also increases with brain size and foldedness. Here, we investigate early brain development in humans, using subjects from the Developing Human Connectome Project, scanned shortly after pre-term or full-term birth, yielding magnetic resonance images of the brain from 29 to 43 postmenstrual weeks. While the global cortical thickness does not change significantly during this development period, its distribution does, with sulci thinning, while gyri thickening. By comparing our results with our recent work on humans and 11 non-human primate species, we also compare the trajectories of primate evolution with human development, noticing that the 2 trends are distinct for volume, surface area, cortical thickness, and gyrification index. Finally, we introduce the global shape index as a proxy for gyrification index; while correlating very strongly with gyrification index, it offers the advantage of being calculated only from local quantities without generating a convex hull or alpha surface.

 

Over the past decades, the buckling instability of layered materials has been the subject of analytical, experimental, and numerical research. These systems have traditionally been considered with stress-free surfaces, and the influence of surface pressure is understudied. In this study, we developed a finite element model of a bilayer experiencing compression, and found that it behaves differently under surface pressure. We investigated the onset of buckling, the initial wavelength, and the post-buckling behavior of a bilayer system under two modes of compression (externally applied and internally generated by growth). Across a wide range of stiffness ratios, 1 < μf/μs < 100, we observed decreased stability in the presence of surface pressure, especially in the low-stiffness-contrast regime, μf/μs < 10. Our results suggest the importance of pressure boundary conditions for the stability analysis of bilayered systems, especially in soft and living matter physics, such as folding of the cerebral cortex under cerebrospinal fluid pressure, where pressure may affect morphogenesis and buckling patterns.