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Taher A Saif's blog

Call for nominations for SES awards

Submitted by Taher A Saif on

 

The Society of Engineering Science (SES) oversees several awards and honors to members and eminent scholars of the field. A total of five medals are offered on an annual basis as well as election to Fellow grade of the Society. The awards are: A.C. Eringen Medal, Engineering Science Medal, William Prager Medal, G.I. Taylor Medal and the SES Young Investigator Medal.

 

Mechanics connection to memory

Submitted by Taher A Saif on
research

Mechanical tension contributes to clustering of neurotransmitter vesicles at presynaptic terminals. 

Scott Siechen, Shengyuan Yang, Akira Chiba and Taher Saif

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,   August 4, 2009   vol. 106   no. 31   12611–12616 

http://www.pnas.org/gca?gca=pnas%3B106%2F31%2F12611&allch= 

 

Drying-induced bifurcation in a hydrogel-actuated nanostructure

Submitted by Taher A Saif on
research
gels

Fascinating paper. Congrats to Wei, Xuanhe, and Zhigang. Nice to see a simple and an elegant model together with an intuitively appealing physical interpretation of the bifurcation phenomenon in gels. It woud be interesting to see the time evolution of the drying process and the orientation (theta) of the nano wires.  

Cell mechanics workshop

Submitted by Taher A Saif on
research

The Center for Cellular Mechanics at U of Illinois has recently hosted a week long summer workshop on Cell Mechano Sensitivity (July 30-Aug 3, 2007. The workshop had lectures in the morning an hands on-labs in the aternoons. All the lectures are on the web (with slides and video). They include a large collection of references. The web also has the laboratory protocols for cell culture, cell fixing and staining, single molecule detection, florescence microscopy, and much more. Visit the website:

www.ccm.uiuc.edu  

Plastic Deformation Recovery in Freestanding Nanocrystalline Aluminum and Gold Thin Films

Submitted by Taher A Saif on
research



Science 30 March 2007:
Vol. 315. no. 5820, pp. 1831 - 1834
DOI: 10.1126/science.1137580

Jagannathan Rajagopalan, Jong H. Han, M. Taher A. Saif*

In nanocrystalline metals, lack of intragranular dislocation sources leads to plastic deformation mechanisms that substantially differ from those in coarse-grained metals. However, irrespective of grain size, plastic deformation is considered irrecoverable. We show experimentally that plastically deformed nanocrystalline aluminum and gold films with grain sizes of 65 nanometers and 50 nanometers, respectively, recovered a substantial fraction (50 to 100%) of plastic strain after unloading. This recoverywas time dependent and was expedited at higher temperatures. Furthermore, the stress-strain characteristics during the next loading remained almost unchanged when strain recovery was complete.These observations in two dissimilar face-centered cubic metals suggest that strain recovery might be characteristic of other metals with similar grain sizes and crystalline packing.

Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL 61801, USA.

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