Last weekend, a host of engineers from around the region flooded campus for the annual New England Workshop on the Mechanics of Materials and Structures. In addition to a pretty great line up of speakers (including Markus Buehler of MIT who, along with Northeastern prof Steve Cranford helped coin the term “biomateriomics“), the event held a movie competition, wherein researchers had 60 seconds to present pieces of their work to the community, using nothing but beautiful moving images.

As the workshop website says, “movies have become an integral part of the arsenal of instruments used to communicate scientific research.” The “Gallery of Mechanics,” as the NEW.Mech crew calls this scientific installation, which debuted at Brown University last year, nodded to the increasing role of multimedia in science communications to give the community a “glimpse of the future.”

Below, enjoy the three winners as chosen by the workshop judges, along with a special bonus video, chosen by yours truly:

 

Honorable Mention from iNSolution: Explosive Dehiscence of Jewelweed Seed Capsule by Isaac Bruss of UMass Amherst

 

3rd Place: A Cahn type phase field theory for species diffusion with large elastic deformation, by Claudio di Leo of MIT

 

2nd Place: Creation of sacrificial bonds by a viscous flow instability, by Frederick Gosselin & Renaud Passieux of Ecole Politechnique de Montreal

And before I reveal the grand prize winner, some other stats about this year’s NEW.Mech meeting:

• Invited talks: 4
• Contributed talks:  32
• Posters: 36
• Participants: >200

I’m told the event was quite a success, so stay tuned for more info on individual research projects that were presented by members of the Northeastern community.

 

1st Place: Soap film experiment to study synchronized waving of grass, by Ravi Sigh of Brown University