I had known Liviu since his early days in the Engineering Science and Mechanics Department at Virginia Tech when I was just beginning my own academic career. I had received my PhD from this department in 1981 in an area (composite materials) that at the time was at the cutting edge of high technology. In 1985 I had come back to VA Tech from the industry to continue working in this exciting area in which the ESM Department excelled world-wide. Liviu had arrived shortly thereafter with an already established reputation as a top-notch scientist.

Active polymers are being developed to mimic a salient feature of life: movement in response to stimuli. Large deformation can lead to intriguing phenomena; for example, recent experiments have shown that a voltage can deform a layer of a dielectric elastomer into two coexistent states, one being flat and the other wrinkled. This observation, as well as the needs to analyze large deformation under diverse stimuli, has led us to reexamine the theory of electromechanics.

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:

Recently Henry talked about software that could be used to simulate explosions and introduced CartaBlanca. Luming asked whether anyone had used the software, how good it was, and whether one needed Java to implement models into CartaBlanca.

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.

iMechanica was lunched on 9 September 2006. It took about five months for iMechanica to see its 1000th registered user. Today we are welcoming the 2000th registered user after only another two and half months.

This message about a new book came over the PoroNet (poroelasticity network) mailing list:

Dear Colleagues:

      I would like to inform you that my book "Micromechanics of Heterogeneous Materials” (containing around 700 pages, 140 figures, 3000 formulae, and 1200 references) should be published by Springer on 07.06.07. [Details are on the web http://www.springer.com/west/home/engineering?SGWID=4-175-22-173670290-… ] .

      In the framework of a unique scheme of the proposed multiparticle effective field method, we have undertaken in this book an attempt to analyze the wide class of statical and dynamical, local and nonlocal, linear and nonlinear multiscale problems of composite materials with deterministic (periodic and nonperiodic), random (statistically homogeneous and inhomogeneous, so-called graded) and mixed (periodic structures with random imperfections) structures in bounded and unbounded domains, containing coated or uncoated inclusions of any shape and orientation and subjected to coupled or uncoupled, homogeneous or inhomogeneous external fields of different physical natures.

        Any the remarks and comments regarding the book will be fully appreciated.

The present paper studies the effect of intracranial temperature (ICT) change on intracranial pressure (ICP). Thermal and mechanical effects were analyzed using a 3D finite element model of the human head.

Dr. Suo's group is recently studying the sharp features such as corners or edges. It becomes important to characterize fracture behaviors at corners and edges in microelectronics.

I have two questions,