Here is a hot topic" Overlaps in our knowledge structures " on iMechanica for all of the students!! This belongs to how students iMechanica can be developed or how students can improve it! Please read the comments and let the others know your ideas about this developements. You will find some suggestions there also. With all students ideas collected, there will be a solution to improve current situation for students section. I can say that page and comments are just for students to say how they like their iMechanica to be.

This is a winning entry in the Sci/Terp Video Competition at University of Maryland (UMD).

Reading the article, future role of iMechanica (node/908) posted by Teng (user/10), I am thinking that iMechanica may replace mechanical seminars, lectures conducted by invited mechanicians, in the future.

Academic seminars have several functions: first, to exchange information; second, to build up connections.

Update: An Open Source Review page has been created. Please feel free to leave links, codes and comments on the page. 

Dear Mechanicians,

I have seen that there is lot of code sharing among the mechanicians at iMechanica; a search for the word "code" for example produces nearly fifty entries, of which, I believe, at least half of the posts are pointers to codes and their sharing.

Each one of us developed his own knowledge structure. After graduation we followed different research interests, took different projects, and adopted different approaches, analytical, numerical, or experimental. Therefore the knowledge structure is unique for every person, coming from his/her education background and scientific experiences.

There are several levels for the overlapping in our knowledge structure.

The 7th North American Workshop on Applications of the Physics of Porous Media will be held in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, November 2-6, 2007. This will be the 7th biennial meeting of researchers around the world who are interested in the phenomena associated with physics of fluid flow and deformation in porous media and its applications to a broad range of basic roblems encountered in geophysics, geomechanics, medical physics, and condensed matter physics.

Full details are available at the website:

Recently, there have been many strain gradient theories that are used for the interpretation of size effect at the micron and submicron length scales. The basic idea of these theories is the introduction of a first, or second (or both) gradients of strain or any internal state variable in the governing equations of classical theories.

After testing for some time, Lesley Lam has just upgraded iMechanica to Drupal 5.  She has tried to make every function exactly the same as before, so that users should not see any abrupt changes.  If you do find any unfamiliar behavior of the new version, please leave a comment below.