Two four-year PhD positions are available in the area of computational mechanics at the Materials Science and Engineering Department of Delft University of Technology. The job descriptions are attached.

You may remember that I promised some time ago to discuss each of the topics mentioned by Ken Johnson in his Timoshenko Medal speach. Here I take rail corrugation. Rail corrugation has been noticed at least for 100 years, but (particularly short pitch one in the range 20÷80 mm) has been considered an enigma because measured corrugation wavelength did not relate well with wear instabilitymodels.

I am pleased to announce that Volume 1, Number 2 of the the recently-launched Journal of the Mechanical Behavior of Biomedical Materials (www.elsevier.com/locate/jmbbm) has been published by Elsevier. All JMBBM articles can be accessed free-of-charge on ScienceDirect until September 2008 (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/17516161).

Integrating porous low-permittivity dielectrics into Cu metallization is one of the strategies to reduce power consumption, signal propagation delays, and crosstalk between interconnects for the next generation of integrated circuits. However, the porosity and pore structure of these low-k dielectric materials also strongly affects other important material properties besides their dielectric constant.

A symposium on Experimental Multi-Scale Mechanics is being organized for the 2008 SES conference at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from October 12th through October 15th. The conference website is located at http://ses2008.mechse.uiuc.edu/

To submit abstracts to this symposium please use the abstract submission form and select the symposium title. The deadline for abstract submissions is April 30, 2008.

Prof.D.N. Fang and his collaborators (Prof. Y.P. Wan, Prof. X. Feng and Prof. A.K. Soh) work on the functional materials, such as ferroelectric and ferromagnetic materials. Recently, he published a review article which presents an overview of recent progress on magnetomechanical deformation and fracture of ferromagnetic materials.

Hello imechanica users: I launch a few ideas. Can we improve imechanica stealing ideas from successful web systems like google, amazon, wikipedia, myspace, youtube? Taking the best of the various worlds to improve our imechanica?

Job Description :Postdoctoral fellow position is available in Computational Biomechanics/Nanotechnology at University of Texas at Arlington. The candidate is expected to have a good education and research background in numerical modeling (Fortran/C++/Matlab). The candidate will use numerical methods to study biophysical phenomena in cells and biomolecules and micro/nanofluidic problems in BioMEMS/NEMS, from continuum to nanoscale. Candidate familiar with fluid/solid mechanics and atomistic simulation are highly encouraged to apply. If you are interested, please contact Dr.

I want to numerical calculate vibration of a closed shell of revolution with double layers. There exists Coefficient cot(θ) in the governing equation, where θ is angle between the revolving axle and normal line. Therefore, cot(θ) will incline to infinity when θ is close to zero for the vertex point on the revolving axle. How to deal with the singularity? Can you give me some advices or reference article? Thanks.

Buckling of stiff thin films on compliant substrates has many important applications ranging from stretchable electronics to precision metrology and sensors.  John Hutchinson, Zhiggang Suo, Rui Huang, Xi Chen et al. have developed nice theories for stiff thin film buckling on soft substrate.