MichelleLOyen's blog

How many iMechanica users are on Twitter?  And how many are on Twitter with professional contacts? 

 I started to use Twitter about 4 months ago in a completely social, non-professional context.  As a personal (expat-focussed) blogger, I started to notice that I was
catching blog posts in my Twitter feed before I would see them in my
feed aggregator (Bloglines).   Twitter has emerged as a different sort
of feed aggregator, as well as a provider of information. 

Recently published, this special issue of the Journal of the Mechanical Behavior of Biomedical Materials, dedicated to ‘Nanoindentation of Biological Materials' provides a snapshot of the novel uses on nanoindentation technology that is now readily available to researchers and expands the scope of existing techniques to optimize methods for biological tissues and related biomaterials.

Access the issue online:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/17516161 (ScienceDirect subscribers)

Nature recently favorably reviewed a new self-published book, based on a blog , by a "female physical sciences professor" in the US.  While the overarching theme is clearly about being a female in a male-dominated world, the writings on the blog (and in the book) are in many places general and provide lots of good advice and anecdotes about acadmic life.  The

Highly competitive candidates are sought for locally-funded fellowships in biomechanics at Cambridge University.  The Next Generation Fellowships are being advertised through the new Centre for Trophoblast Research, an interdisciplinary research centre focused on the trophoblast, the critical cell in the development and function of the placenta. 

Save the date for SBC2009!

I stumbled across this interesting blog post yesterday concerning an upcoming course on medicine via web 2.0.   It appeared quite interesting from several perspectives: first, medicine is often associated with being behind the times on technology but this all looks pretty current, secondly it may be the most comprehensive listing of topics I have seen where web 2.0 is applied to a single discipline, and finally it made me wonder what more we could do with mechanics via web 2.0 beyon