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It appears to me that there is more and more research done on discrete approaches to modelling fracture.

Especially for brittle or quasi-brittle materials these methods are undergoing a revival.

I am not sure why this is the case. I am also not in the position to judge if this revival is useful.

I just had recently a look at some of these models and I found these discrete models to be suitable

for description of fracture in heterogeneous materials, where cracks appear at many different positions.

A postdoctoral research position is available immediately at the Mechanobiology Group, Nuffield Department of Orthopaedics, Rheumatologyand Musculoskeletal Sciences at the University of Oxford to study tendon mechanobiology and repair following injury or pathology. This is an exciting opportunity to join a multi-disciplinary team drawn from the Botnar Research Centre, the Oxford Institute of Biomedical Engineering and the John Radcliffe Hospital to work at the forefront of strategically important musculoskeletal research.

Dear colleagues,

Experimental nanomechanics is a frequently discussed topic on imechanica, see e.g. the very active monthly topics by Xiaodong Li, Julia Greer and Wei Cai.

Continuing on this, I would like to draw your attention to a paper we recently published:

"In situ observation of dislocation nucleation and escape in a submicrometre aluminium single crystal" by Sang Ho Oh, Marc Legros, Daniel Kiener & Gerhard Dehm (http://www.nature.com/nmat/journal/v8/n2/abs/nmat2370.html).

Howard A. Stone, of Harvard University, is elected to the National Academy of Engineering, for the development of fundamental concepts and novel applications in microfluidics and for improving the understanding of small-scale, viscous-flow phenomena.  Here is the full list of members elected in 2009.

We welcome applications for a 4 year PhD positon in the field of computational mechanics and materials science. Further details in the attachment.