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Tetrahedral: The key to life on Earth?

Submitted by Rod Ruoff on

It seems to me that tetrahedral bonding is responsible for life on earth. 

One might leap to the (reasonable) conclusion that I am referring to the element carbon and its ability to form sp3 bonds.  Life does depend on carbon, no doubt. But where does life exist, by and large?

Thin films: wrinkling vs buckle-delamination

Submitted by Rui Huang on

H. Mei, J.Y. Chung, H.-H. Yu, C.M. Stafford, and R. Huang, Buckling modes of elastic thin films on elastic substrates. Applied Physics Letters 90, 151902 (2007).

Two modes of thin film buckling are commonly observed, one with interface delamination (e.g., telephone cord blisters) and the other with no delamination (i.e., wrinkling). Which one would occur for your film?

A new type of bubble raft--challenge for clever students

Submitted by Rod Ruoff on

17 years ago, while a postdoc at IBM meant to be doing other things, I thought about the following. Then recently I visited Ali Argon at MIT, and we discussed conventional bubble rafts and how useful they had been in studies of some problems in mechanics...such as of defects and so on.

Does anyone know a collection of Lennard Jones potential material constants??

Submitted by Mike Ciavarella on

I am trying to find out the theoretical adhesive strength limit of a few materials, or more precisely the ratio adhesive strength limit to elastic modulus. I think this is after all part of the Lennard-Jones constants potential - theoretical adhesive strength limit is simply the maximum of the curve.