I would like to do lateral force microscopy on biological samples.  The more I look into it, it seems it is very difficult to calibrate AFM tips for lateral force microscopy.  Does anyone have any suggestions about how to calibrate tips and which tips are conducive for lateral AFM? 

The cardiac myocyte is the basic contractile unit of the heart. In addition to potentiating contraction through chemical and electrical means, each myocyte is a complex sensor that monitors the mechanics of the heart. Through largely unknown means, mechanical stimuli are transduced into biochemical information and responses. Such mechanotransduction has been implicated in the etiology of many cardiovascular pathologies [1]. One such mechanical parameter that the myocyte most likely monitors is the hydrostatic pressure in the myocardium.

Though not that original, I want to recommend Timoshenko. Since many people have mentioned it already, I will discuss a Brief on Tensor Analysis by James Simmonds. Though not always useful, I sometimes use it to remember tensor rules that I have forgotten. The book is divided into chapters as follows:

I: Vectors and Tensors

II: General Bases and Tensor Notation

III: Newton's Law and Tensor Calculus

IV: Gradient, Del Operator, Covariant Differentiation, Divergence Theorem

Again, sometime it is not that useful and you spend your time trying to read it while not learning much, but it does come in handy sometimes. You can see the amazon link:

Amazon

My name is Will Adams and I am a first year grad student in BME. I have no previous courses in solid mechanics or strength of materials but I have taken two fluid mechanics courses, ES220 and ES123, as an undergrad which contain many of the same lines of thinking. Hopefully the math formalisms of these classes will help in ES240 but having no solids background leaves me with little intuition about experimental results. Hopefully I can acquire this here. I was a BME major as an undergrad here in DEAS. I work in the Disease Biophysics Group under Prof Parker (www.deas.harvard.edu/diseasebiophysics) where we are concerned with the biomechanics of healthy and disease cardiac tissue.