Mogadalai Gururajan's blog

Recently, the Royal Society Science book prize shortlist was announced; though the shortlisted books cover psychology, evolution, biodiversity, medicine and neurobiology, none in the area of materials or mechanics made it to the list. Or, pick any Best American Science writing volume--there are hardly any articles about materials or mechanics that make it to these anthologies.

Introduction

The blogosphere is abuzz with the latest report of the generalisation of the von Neumann-Mullins grain growth relation to 3 (and N) dimensions by MacPherson and Srolovitz (As an interesting aside, almost all the reports say mathematical structure of beer foam structure resolved, or words to that effect --hence, I also decided to join the bandwagon on that one). I heard Prof. Srolovitz describe the work in a seminar nearly six months ago. Based on my notes of the talk, I would like the explain their work in this post. Curvature in the following refers to mean curvature (and not Gaussian).

JOM is a monthly publication of TMS--The minerals, metals, and materials society. It covers a wide range of materials topics. I expecially like the overview articles, which, in four or five pages pack lots of information. Further, the historical articles about metallurgy and materials in ancient civilizations will interest those of you who like to read about history in general, and science history, in particular.

In an inaugural article in the latest issue of PNAS, George C Schatz writes on Using theory and computation to model nanoscale properties. Here is the abstract of the article:

In the recent issue of Science, researchers from UCLA (Chung et al) report on an ambient pressure synthesis (using arc melting) of a compound, namely, rhenium diboride, which is superhard. Apparently, the material leaves scratch marks on the surface of diamond. Here is the abstract of the paper:

Here is a video from the Seed magazine called Science in Silico. The video shows results from large scale simulations (and visualization) of fractals, microscopic dynamic processes in ribosomes, structure of viruses, bacterial flagellum, turbulence, explosions, and the modelling of cosmological events.

In a recent Progress Article in Nature Materials, David Taylor, Jan G Hazenberg, and T Clive Lee write about the damage that human bones sustain as a result of cyclic stresses under which they operate and the repair mechanisms that operate.

From this Modern Mechanix scan of a 4 page article from the 1924 issue of Popular mechanics, we learn about Lincoln, the inventor!