Hyperpolarization-activated cyclic nucleotide-gated (HCN) channels regulate neuronal excitability, pacemaking, dendritic integration, and homeostatic plasticity and are culprits in aberrant neuronal activity in certain epilepsies. In this issue of Neuron two manuscripts (Santoro et al. and Zolles et al.) report that HCN channel gating and expression are controlled by Trip8b (Pex5R) but with a b...

An assessment of the plasticity-induced crack-closure concept is made, in light of some of the questions that have been raised on the validity of the concept, and the assumptions that have been made concerning crack-tip damage below the crack-opening stress. The impact of using other crack-tip parameters, such as the cyclic crack-tip displacement, to model crack-growth rate behavior was studied...

Internal stress plasticity occurs when a small external stress biases internal mismatch strains produced by, e.g., phase transformation or thermal expansion mismatch. At small applied stresses, this deformation mechanism is characterized by a deformation rate which is proportional to the applied stress and is higher than for conventional creep mechanisms. In this work, we demonstrate the operat...

A simple constitutive model for the inelastic response of steel under monotonic and random cyclic loading conditions is developed within the framework of bounding surface plasticity. The particular feature that distinguishes this model from other similar ones is the ability of the bounding surface formulation to describe in a very simple way the initial “plateau” type of perfectly plastic respo...

Oxide scales that form on superalloys eventually spall, especially upon thermal cycling. This phenomenon is motivated by the large residual compression in the oxide. Buckling and interface crack propagation are known aspects of this behavior, but the origin of the interface separation that precedes and activates buckling is not understood. One mechanism is described and analyzed in this article...

Drastic changes in the environment during a lifetime require developmental and physiological flexibility to ensure animal survival. Desert locusts, Schistocerca gregaria, live in an extremely changeable environment, which alternates between periods of rainfall and abundant food and periods of drought and starvation. In order to survive, locusts display an extreme form of phenotypic plasticity t...