I give a very brief review of aspects of internal dynamics that affect the global shape of a galaxy, focusing on triaxiality, bars and warps. There is general agreement that large central masses can destroy triaxial shapes, but recent simulations of this process seem to suffer from numerical difficulties. Central black holes alone are probably not massive enough to destroy global triaxiality, b...

We present theoretical and observational studies of strong gravitational lenses produced by clusters of galaxies. Our purpose is to test the Cold Dark Matter (CDM) model at small and highly nonlinear scales where it has been claimed that the CDM model may confront several difficulties. We concentrate our attention on the statistics of strong gravitational lenses because the strong lensing is se...

The possibility of the appearance of the C4 symmetry in the rotational bands is studied within the particle-rotor model. The role of the triaxiality of the rotor is analized.

The morphological distribution of primordial density peaks is assessed. Previous determinations, those of Peacock & Heavens (1985) and those of Bardeen et al. (1986) have contradictory concluded that there exist a tendency towards prolate or towards oblate shapes, respectively. By using two methods, the Hessian and the inertia tensor momenta we have performed numerical determinations of the tri...

An extensive experimental campaign was run to investigate the influence of loading direction, stress state (triaxiality ratio ranging from −0.5 1), and strain rate (from 10 −3 1.5x10 3 s −1 ) on ductile fracture Ti-6Al-4V titanium alloy. Microscopic macroscopic observations provided some insight into shear-driven or micro-voiding-controlled damage mechanisms prevailing at low high triaxiality r...

We present a deep near-infrared wide-angle photometric analysis of the structure of the inner Galactic bar and central disk. The presence of a triaxial structure at the centre of the Galaxy is confirmed, consistent with a bar inclined at 22±5.5 • from the Sun-Galactic centre line, extending to about 2.5 kpc from the Galactic centre and with a rather small axis ratio. A feature at ℓ=−9.8 • not a...

Notched tensile bars of a high strength structural steel were loaded to void coalescense. The resuIts show that the damage curve determined using radially loaded specimens is not valid for specimens under nonradial loading. The results of the experiments with different load histories of notched tensile bars show, that a single parameter criterion like a damage parameter is not sufficient to des...