The 'decapitation gambit' holds that, if physical decapitation normally entails the death of the human being, then physiological decapitation, evident in cases of total brain failure, entails the death of the human being. This argument has been challenged by Franklin Miller and Robert Truog, who argue that physical decapitation does not necessarily entail the death of human beings and that ther...

The failure criterion of Leguillon at reentrant corners in brittle elastic materials (Leguillon 2002, Eur J Mech A/Solids 21: 61–72; Leguillon et al. (2003), Eur J Mech A—Solids 22(4): 509–524) validated in (Yosibash et al. 2004, Int J Fract 125(3–4): 307–333) for mode I loading is being extended to mixed mode loading and is being validated by experimental observations. We present an explicit d...

he matched case-control, single-centred, prospective study by Ozturk et al. was designed to compare the NT-proBNP levels between hospitalized congestive heart failure (CHF) patients and outpatients.1 The main purpose of their study was to define a certain cut-off NT-proBNP value for hospitalization of CHF patients. We will address five points to challenge their study design and presentation (As...

Abstract: The distribution of the magnitudes of damage avalanches during a failure process typically follows a power law. When these avalanches are recorded close to the point at which the system fails catastrophically, we find that the power law has an exponent which differs from the one characterizing the size distribution of all avalanches. We demonstrate this analytically for bundles of man...

Contacts at the Coulomb threshold are unstable to tangential perturbations and thus contribute to failure at the microscopic level. How is such a local property related to global failure, beyond the effective picture given by a Mohr–Coulomb type failure criterion? Here, we use a simulated bed of frictional disks slowly tilted under the action of gravity to investigate the link between the avala...

High-performance biological materials such as nacre, spider silk or bone have evolved a staggered microstructure consisting of stiff and strong elongated inclusions aligned with the direction of loading. This structure leads to useful combinations of stiffness, strength and toughness, and it is therefore increasingly mimicked in bio-inspired composites. The performance of staggered composites c...

according to high height and weak tensile strength of materials in minarets, it is necessary to study the structural behaviour of minarets under earthquake loading. therefore nine historical brick masonry minarets in isfahan have been modelled and analysed by applying the nonlinear finite element method for two cases: 1) the whole minaret, and 2) only the outer shell. results show that all mina...

One of the major factors governing the mode of failure in disordered solids is the effective range R over which the stress field is modified following a local rupture event. In a random fiber bundle model, considered as a prototype of disordered solids, we show that the failure mode is nucleation dominated in the large system size limit, as long as R scales slower than L(ζ), with ζ=2/3. For a f...