Blog posts

via Ken P. Chong, National Science Foundation 

The Kavli Prize – three international awards for outstanding contributions to the fields of nanoscience, neuroscience and astrophysics – will be awarded for the first time in 2008. The Kavli Foundation has established these international awards to recognize seminal advances in scientific research. Each prize will consist of a scroll, a medal and a cash award of USD 1 million.

The Prizes will be awarded at a ceremony in Oslo, Norway, Fred Kavli’s native country, every two years, beginning in 2008.  http://www.kavliprize.no/

When a strained film is grown on a vicinal substrate, the steps advance like a train when the deposited atoms have sufficient mobility to reach the step edges. However, as the steps advance, the strain-induced force monopoles associated with the steps cause the steps to attract to each other (J. Tersoff, PRL 74, 4962, (1995)), resulting in a thermodynamic instability of the steps in the form of step bunching (J. Tersoff, et al., PRL 75, 2730 (1995)).

The following video is a nice depiction of how the eigenmodes of a plate change with increasing forcing frequency.

The 20th Annual Melosh Competition for the Best Student Paper on Finite Element Analysis will be held at Duke University on April 25, 2008.  The competition has become one of the premier graduate student events in the broad area of mechanics.   We have held the competition at a variety of locations over the past several years, and this year we are returning to Durham.