Blog posts
Tetrahedral: The key to life on Earth?
It seems to me that tetrahedral bonding is responsible for life on earth.
One might leap to the (reasonable) conclusion that I am referring to the element carbon and its ability to form sp3 bonds. Life does depend on carbon, no doubt. But where does life exist, by and large?
Thin films: wrinkling vs buckle-delamination
H. Mei, J.Y. Chung, H.-H. Yu, C.M. Stafford, and R. Huang, Buckling modes of elastic thin films on elastic substrates. Applied Physics Letters 90, 151902 (2007).
Two modes of thin film buckling are commonly observed, one with interface delamination (e.g., telephone cord blisters) and the other with no delamination (i.e., wrinkling). Which one would occur for your film?
Joost Vlassak is promoted to Full Professor with Tenure at Harvard
We have just heard the great news that our colleague (iMechanician number 12), Joost Vlassak, has been promoted to Full Professor with Tenure at Harvard.
metal foam
cellular metal: space is divided into distinct cells. The boundaries of these cells are made of solid metal, the interior are voids. Ideally, the individual cells are all separated from each other by metal but often this restriction is relaxed
A new type of bubble raft--challenge for clever students
17 years ago, while a postdoc at IBM meant to be doing other things, I thought about the following. Then recently I visited Ali Argon at MIT, and we discussed conventional bubble rafts and how useful they had been in studies of some problems in mechanics...such as of defects and so on.
Plastic bonded energetic materials
plastic bonded explosives are composites containing energetic grains, ranging in size from less than one to a few hundred micrometers, embedded in a matrix of high-polymer binder.
Quantum Confinement Induced Strain in Quantum Dots
In the attached pre-print, we investigate quantum confinement induced strain in quantum dots. This paper has been written keeping in mind the condensed matter physics/quantum dot community (accepted for publication in Phy.
A pool filled with non-newtonian fluid
They filled a pool with a mix of cornstarch and water made on a concrete mixer truck. It becomes a non-newtonian fluid. When stress is applied to the liquid it exhibits properties of a solid. Video was recorded at Barcelona, Spain.