In early days of Applied Mechanics News, I encountered a practical problem. How do we call ourselves? I began with a phrase "people in the international community of applied mechanics". The phrase is inclusive and descriptive, but is too long, too timid and too clumsy. It is like calling entropy "the logarithm of the number of quantum states". I have also heard the phrase "mechanics people", which I don't like either. It sounds too folksy, like calling a gynecologist a women's doctor.

More than fifty years ago, people realized that we can use fusion for energy, but the problem remains where and how to keep a plasma of 100 million degrees centigrade.

For TOKAMAK, one of the approaches to use the fusion power, now comes the news: "On 21 November, Ministers from the seven ITER Parties came together to sign the agreement to establish the international Organization that will implement ITER."

What might be the differences, if there is any, between mechanical signaling and chemical signaling in a living cell?

Here is one answer from Nokia.

Nokia 888 communicator, a concept design which recently won the Nokia's Benelux Design Award. It uses liquid battery, flexible touch display, speech recognition, touch sensitive body cover which lets it understand and adjust to the environment. It has a simple programmable body mechanism so that it changes forms in different situations. Don't forget to enjoy a video demo of this cell phone of future.
Yet one more future application of flexible electronics, it's clear there're great mechanics and materials challenges in making electronic devices flexible. It will be great mechanicians can help accelerate the advance of this emerging technology.

ICHMM 2008 seeks dissemination of recent, leading edge research results as well as in-depth discussions of future directions in the challenging subject of heterogeneous material mechanics. Sessions in the Huangshan International Hotel will focus on recent original research developments, while invited panel discussins in the subsequent Huangshan Mountain retreat aim to stimulate future research directions.

Co-Chairs

J. Fan, Alfred University, USA and Chongqing University

The topics of interest are:

There has been a lot of attention on the study of mechanics of proteins and/or single molecules. Such study was typically implemented by using classical molecular dynamics (MD) simulation. In spite of ability to describe the dynamics of biological macromolecules (e.g. proteins), MD simulation exhibits the computational restriction in the spatial and temporal scale. In order to overcome such computational limitation, the coarse-grained model has recently been taken into account. In this review, I would take a look at a couple of coarse-grained models of protein molecules.

Questions about meshfree methods are now addressed in the forum, under the Computational Mechanics subheading.

If you click on a question below, you will be redirected to the forum. I will update this post as more questions are added. Other experts are encouraged to augment my response there.

1. If I have meshfree shape functions that satisfy Kronecker-Delta, can I satisfy essential boundary conditions?

2. Is a mesh required in meshfree methods?