Blog posts

I am chairing the search for a new faculty member in the Materials Science and Engineering Department at Lehigh. As you will see in the ad below, the position is in the Biomaterials area. I would like to encourage more applications from candidates with interests in biomechanics (so I will have good opportunities to collaborate), and would like to invite applicants from this forum. If you are not personally in a position to apply, please pass the announcement along to anyone you know who might be suitable.

It is well known that metals are hardened by deformation and soften by annealing. How about nanostructured metals? Can we reply on conventional metal-working lore?

The Max Planck Society (MPS) aims at promoting young international scientists by enabling them to perform their research (in all fields pursued by the MPS) at a Max Planck Institute of their choice.

The MPS offers Independent Junior Research Group Leader positions (W2; equivalent to associate professor level without tenure) granted for a period of 5 years with the option for prolonging twice for 2 years. The deadline for application is January 10, 2007.

Hello everyone,

Professor Suo suggested that I share this speculative idea that I once posted on Applied Mechanics News here on iMechanica!

In the future, we would like to reach out to children as early as their elementary school years to get them excited about topics drawn from Applied Mechanics. One approach to this goal takes inspiration from the successful "Le main a la pate", or "hands-in-dough", program in France (http://www.lamap.fr/ ), but extends the idea of hands-on science to take advantage of the internet.

• 30 March 2007. At a suggestion of Henry Tan, an RSS feed for comments is added as a button"comment at a glance" on the right side of iMechanica.
• 29 March 2007. An aggregator, "Random readings", is added to the rightside of iMechanica.
• 7 March 2007. Michelle Oyen posted an entry "Making iMechanica a better global forum".
  

R. Huang, Applied Physics Letters 87, 151911 (2005).

In this study, bone cells were successfully cultured into a micropatterned network with dimensions close to that of in vivo osteocyte networks using microcontact printing and self-assembled monolyers (SAMs). The optimal geometric parameters for the formation of these networks were determined in terms of circle diameters and line widths. Bone cells patterned in these networks were also able to form gap junctions with each other, shown by immunofluorescent staining for the gap junction protein connexin 43, as well as the transfer of gap-junction permeable calcein-AM dye.