A long metal thread breaks more easily than a short one—an observation Leonardo da Vinci made in the 15th century. It all comes down to simple statistics: the larger an object, the more likely it is to contain a region that breaks when subject to stress. The fracture properties of brittle materials also depend on the disorder in their underlying structure: a homogeneous material like glass brea...

BACKGROUND There is no clear definition of osteogenesis imperfecta (OI). The most widely used classification of OI divides the disease in four types, although it has been suggested that there may be at least 12 forms of OI. These forms have been named with numbers, eponyms or descriptive names. Some of these syndromes can actually be considered congenital forms of brittle bones resembling OI (S...

We introduce a lattice model able to describe damage and yielding in heterogeneous materials ranging from brittle to ductile ones. Ductile fracture surfaces, obtained when the system breaks once the strain is completely localized, are shown to correspond to minimum energy surfaces. The similarity of the resulting fracture paths to the limits of brittle fracture or minimum energy surfaces is qua...

Peridynamic (PD) models of bodies without pre-cracks, based on a single fracture parameter (associated with the critical energy), produce different strengths when horizon sizes are used to simulate crack nucleation under quasi-static conditions. To maintain same strength and energy sizes, extra parameters have be introduced in failure model. Bilinear trilinear bond force-strain relationships be...

A 3-year-old boy presented with acute corneal hydrops on the left eye and spontaneous corneal rupture on the right eye. A diagnosis of brittle cornea syndrome was confirmed by molecular analysis. A novel mutation, the homozygous variant c.17T>G, p.V6G, was found in the gene for PR-domain-containing protein 5 (PRDM5) in exon 1. Brittle cornea syndrome is a rare connective tissue disease with typ...

The Earth’s tectonic plates are strong, viscoelastic shells which make up the outermost part of a thermally convecting, predominantly viscous layer; at the boundaries between plates the rheology is thought to be dominated by brittle processes. Brittle failure of the lithosphere occurs when stresses are high. In order to build a realistic simulation of the planet’s evolution, the complete viscoe...

Galileo stereo images covering about 1500 km 2 of Uruk Sulcus on Ganymede have revealed two scales of ridges; (1) large-scale ridges and troughs spaced -6 km apart, corresponding to the "grooves" seen in Voyager images, and (2) small-scale ridges spaced hundreds of meters apart superimposed on the large-scale ridges. We interpret the small-scale ridges to be the result of tilt-block normal faul...