I am in the process of applying for a PhD in computational solid mechanics in the US and I am about to take the GRE. Well I have been kind of busy at my work and didn't really get time to study the word list.

My question is, how much weight does the verbal part have in admission/fellowship/assistantship decisions? If I have really good GPA's and research experience with enthusiastic refrees, can I still make it with medicore results on the verbal part?

Members of the International Mechanics Community

Dear Mechanics Colleagues,

H. Mei, Y. Pang, and R. Huang, International Journal of Fracture 148, 331-342 (2007).

Following a previous effort published in MRS Proceedings, we wrote a journal article of the same title, with more numerical results. While the main conclusions stay the same, a few subtle points are noted in this paper.

Howard Stone, of the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, has won the first Batchelor Prize.  The newly established Prize is sponsored by Cambridge University Press and the Journal of Fluid Mechanics.  The award of US$25,000 will be presented at the International Congress of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics (ICTAM), taking place in Adelaide in August 2008.  Howard is iMechanica user number 96.

Full support is available for 2 PhD students in cellular mechanics group in Biomedical Engineering Department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.  

The applicants should have mechanics, materials or soft matter physics background, with some experimental experience at micro-scales.  Experience with any of the following is considered a
plus: computational mechanics, cell/tissue culture, microscopy, image analysis, photonics.

The Chronicle of Higher Education just published its ranking of all programs (fields) of universities in the States.

http://chronicle.com/stats/productivity

This ranking is based on the productivity (publications, citations, grants and awards, nothing else), rather than people perceptions (department head's evaluations) as US News and World Report. 

Of course one should never take any ranking very seriously, but it is interesting to take a look at this website.

Two four-year doctoral fellowships at the LaCàN Research group (http://www-lacan.upc.es/), Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC, Barcelona, Spain).

These two fellowships, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Education ("beca FPI"), coverfull tuition, a monthly stipend and provide funds for short international research stays. The starting date is expected in the Summer-Fall 2008.

Call for papers

Minisymposium on

“Multiscale Simulations for Composite Materials and Mechanical Systems”(ID-110)

on the

8th World Congress on Computational Mechanics (WCCM8)

and the

5th European Congress on Computational Methods in Applied Sciences and Engineering (ECCOMAS 2008)

to be held at the Lido Island in Venice (Italy) on 30 June - 4 July 2008  

Dear Colleagues, 

News from the CNN.com/Technology: Digital library surpasses initial goal of 1 million books