Mechanical forces are ubiquitous in the living world, as the physical environment interacts with living beings. Moreover, animals, plants, bacteria, and cells exert forces on their environment e.g. to move, crawl or communicate. Thus, it is not surprising that mechanisms to sense stress, strain, tension, shear forces, and displacement have evolved. Mechanobiological sensing events include, amongst others, the sense of touch, the sense of hearing, pressure sensing in the cardiovascular system, strain sensing in muscles and in the cytoskeleton, as well as the stimulation of certain marine plankton to emit chemoluminescence upon mechanical perturbation. Most of these mechanisms are...