MichelleLOyen's blog

Attached is the first announcement and call for papers for "nanomech 8", the 8th European Symposium on Nanomechanical Testing to be held in Huckelhoven, Germany, 3rd-5th September, 2007. Full details are also available at the conference website. The special focus for this year's meeting is "Across the scales: Size effects and scaling phenomena in micro- and nano-mechanics". Abstracts are due 5th May, 2007.

Abstracts are due April 27, 2007 for the Second International Conference on Mechanics of Biomaterials and Tissues, to take place on the Hawai’ian island of Kaua’i. Full call for papers is at the conference website. The conference is hosted by Elsevier and the launch of a new Elsevier journal on biomechanics will coincide with the timing of the meeting. (The official journal website is here.)

A new book, "Tissue Mechanics" by SC Cowin and SB Doty is of potential interest to those from a classical mechanics background considering work in biomechanics. Downloadable versions of the first two chapters are available at the book's website along with a full table of contents and other supplemental information.

Abstract submission is now open for the 2007 ASME Summer Bioengineering Conference, 20-24 June, 2007 in Keystone, Colorado. Full details can be found on the conference website. Please note that there is a vibrant and competitive student paper competition for different

I have not read the above-mentioned paper, as I have never been able to find it. However it is said to be "a brilliantly insightful paper which was to lay the foundations of modern elasticity." However, I believe it is also noteworthy for being one of the major contributions by a female mechanician prior to the modern era. For a great biography of Sophie Germain, including a fantastic quote from a letter from Carl Gauss on discovering that she was female--and not "Monsieur Le Blanc"--visit this site (from which the above quote, on the impact of her paper, came).

There are no female mechanicians listed on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanicians but I believe it could be argued that Germain deserves a mention!

Applications are invited from suitably qualified candidates for a University Lectureship in Solid Mechanics, which falls within the Mechanics, Materials and Design Division of the Engineering Department. The successful candidate will take up the appointment as soon as possible.

The lectureship has recently been endowed by David and Susan Hibbitt, and the aim is to attract a high calibre researcher with a record of scholarship and research in experimental, computational and/or theoretical solid mechanics. Expertise is required in the mechanics of materials (structural, biological or energy materials, for example) and the successful candidate is expected to make a significant contribution to the Department’s teaching and research activities and to build a strong, externally funded research programme. The activity will fit within the Cambridge Centre for Micromechanics, which is an inter-departmental, inter-disciplinary research group housed within the Engineering Department.

Biomechanics is a reasonably well-developed field of study, with a modern history usually linked to the pioneering work of Prof. Y.C. Fung in the 1960s. There are a number of dedicated biomechanics journals (including but not limited to the Journal of Biomechanics and the Journal of Biomechanical Engineering). The field is well-enough established to have several generations of researchers working on the subject at universities across the world.

Symposium DD at the upcoming Materials Research Society Annual Meeting (Nov. 26-Dec. 1, Boston, MA) will be the latest in a series of MRS symposia on the mechanics of biological materials and materials designed following natural principles ("biomimetic" or "bio-inspired").   The full program is available at the MRS website (www.mrs.org).  This topic was also the subject of the August, 2006 focus issue of the Journal of Materials Research, which contained over 30 articles on the subject.

A viscous-elastic-plastic indentation model was used to assess the local variability of properties in healing porcine bone. Constant loading- and unloading-rate depth-sensing indentation tests were performed and properties were computed from nonlinear curve-fits of the unloading displacement-time data. Three properties were obtained from the fit: modulus (the coefficient of an elastic reversible process), hardness (the coefficient of a nonreversible, time-independent process) and viscosity (the coefficient of a nonreversible, time-dependent process). The region adjacent to the dental implant interface demonstrated a slightly depressed elastic modulus along with an increase in local time-dependence (lower viscosity); there was no clear trend in bone hardness with respect to the implant interface.