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In this paper we review the theory of the ``falling chimney'', which deals with the breaking in mid-air of tall structures, when they fall to the ground. We show that these ruptures can be caused by either shear forces, typically developing…

Mechanical instability in a pre-tensioned finite hyperelastic tube subjected to a slowly increasing internal pressure produces a spatially localized bulge at a critical pressure. The subsequent fate of the bulge, under continued inflation,…

The sticking of a soft polystyrene colloidal particle to a planar glass plate was studied by a microrheological technique using an optical tweezer to trap the particle and a piezoelectric-stage to position the plate and to sinusoidally…

The mechanical response and load bearing capacity of high performance polymer composites changes due to diffusion of a fluid, temperature, oxidation or the extent of the deformation. Hence, there is a need to study the response of bodies…

Confined motions in complex environments are ubiquitous in microbiology. These situations invariably involve the intricate coupling between fluid flow, soft boundaries, surface forces and fluctuations. In the present study, such a coupling…

We study numerically the motion of a one dimensional array of Brownian particles in a washboard potential, driven by an external stochastic force and interacting via short range repulsive forces. In particular, we investigate the role of…

One of the least studied universal deformations of incompressible nonlinear elasticity, namely the straightening of a sector of a circular cylinder into a rectangular block, is revisited here and, in particular, issues of existence and…

Pressurized fluid injection into underground rocks occurs in applications like carbon sequestration, hydraulic fracturing, and wastewater disposal, and may lead to human-induced earthquakes and surface uplift. The fluid injection raises the…

We study the lubrication of fluid-immersed soft interfaces and show that elastic deformation couples tangential and normal forces and thus generates lift. We consider materials that deform easily, due to either geometry (e.g. a shell) or…

We use numerical simulations and an effective-medium theory to study the rigidity percolation transition of the honeycomb and diamond lattices when weak bond-bending forces are included. We use a rotationally invariant bond-bending…

We address the folding induced by differential growth in soft layered solids via an elementary model that consists of a soft growing neo-Hookean elastic layer adhered to a deep elastic substrate. As the layer/substrate modulus ratio is…

When humans infer underlying probabilities from stochastic observations, they exhibit biases and variability that cannot be explained on the basis of sound, Bayesian manipulations of probability. This is especially salient when beliefs are…

Soft colloids allow to explore high density states well beyond random close packing. An important open question is whether softness controls the dynamics under these dense conditions. While experimental works reported conflicting results,…

Low-cost coin vibrational motors, used in haptic feedback, exhibit rotational internal motion inside a rigid case. Because the motor case motion exhibits rotational symmetry, when placed into a fluid such as glycerin, the motor does not…

Nearly three decades ago, the field of mechanics was cautioned of the obscure nature of cavitation processes in soft materials [Gent, A.N., 1990. Cavitation in rubber: a cautionary tale. Rubber Chemistry and Technology, 63(3)]. Since then,…

A simple model is proposed aimed to investigate how the amount of dissociated ions influences the mechanical stability of viral capsids. After an osmotic and mechanical equilibrium is established with the outer solution, a non-adiabatic…

It is shown that a compound elastic structure, which displays a dynamic instability, may be designed as the union (or 'fusion') of two structures which are stable when separately analyzed. The compound elastic structure has two degrees of…

We study an integrable Hamiltonian reducible to free fermions which is subjected to an imperfect periodic driving with the amplitude of driving (or kicking) randomly chosen from a binary distribution like a coin-toss problem. The randomness…

We study a system of interacting reinforced random walks defined on polygons. At each stage, each particle chooses an edge to traverse which is incident to its position. We allow the probability of choosing a given edge to depend on the sum…

We study the mechanics of a reversible decohesion (unzipping) of an elastic layer subjected to quasi-static end-point loading. At the micro level the system is simulated by an elastic chain of particles interacting with a rigid foundation…