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The thermo-mechanical balance and constitutive equations for a porous material with large irregular pores are investigated by imposing internal kinematic and thermal constraints on ellipsoidal microstructures, in order to involve in the constitutive relations higher-order derivatives of macro- and micro-displacements and/or temperature avoiding classical incompatibilities.

The differential system of balance equations for a binary mixture of fluids as the system of a single fluid, plus that relating to diffusive motion, is used to present constitutive proposals for the terms of exchange and to verify the metaphysical principles of Truesdell. After two particular examples are considered presenting peculiar constitutive relations for such growth terms and study small plane waves in order to verify the influence of these terms on the solutions.

Forensic radiology is the application of diagnostic imaging used like source of information in medico-legal issues, because with its technology and examinations it can establish a source for scientific evidence that can be reliable and precise; moreover every diagnostic imaging examination can be considered a forensic examination (Kudlad et al., The state of forensic radiography in the United States, American Society of Radiologic Technologists, Albuquerque, NM, 2010). Judge Owen E. Lefevre was the first USA judge to admit radiographs as evidence in a civil case in 1896 (Adams, An introduction to forensic imaging). From that year, the use of computed tomography (CT) in forensic investigation is growing and even other technologies that were used just for clinically purpose are now considered useful for forensic investigation.

In environmental geotechnics, transportation calculations for unsaturated soils have to account for pore-water suction, air content, presence of colloids, diffusion mechanism and the amount of adsorbed water upon the inner porous surfaces. We develop a new physically based three-component model which uses the balance principles for an immiscible mixture of continua with microstructure; includes phenomena of diffusion, adsorption and chemical reactions; proposes suitable constitutive equations to study the flow of a fluid/contaminant mixture through the soil modeled as an elastic porous solid. We also investigate on the conditions of hyperbolicity of the subsystem describing the liquid mixture.

Modelling granular materials can help us to understand their behaviour on the microscopic scale, and to obtain macroscopic continuum relations by a micro-macro transition approach. In this paper, the Discrete Element Method (DEM) is used to investigate the influence of the irreversibility at the contact level on the macroscopic behaviour of granular packings in the context of an elasto-plastic cohesive contact model. From the microscopic contact characteristics the effective stiffness parameters are determined at different volume fractions. The conventional way to calculate the stiffness of a packing is to apply compression or shear strain to the entire system and measure the stress response. The results show that the stiffness of the packings increases with the volume fraction as expected. Surprisingly, the samples experience multiple regimes depending on the applied strain and the hysteretic contact model. In the limit of elastic regime at very small strain, all contacts have equal unloading (reversible) stiffness k 2 . As the strain increases, the contacts transit to the loading stiffness branch and the macroscopic stiffness show a second plateau, where the microstructure of the packing does not change but the contact forces do due to the (irreversible) transition from the unloading to the loading branch and the corresponding reduction in stiffness by k 1 ∕k 2 . Only for much larger strain particles start to rearrange and the overall behaviour becomes plastic.

Food has long been considered a primary marker of cultural heritage, and in many places around the world it helps foster cultural revitalization movements—bottom-up, community-based undertakings that stand in stark contrast to traditional economic development paradigms. A revitalization movement is a deliberate, organized, conscious effort by members of a society to construct a more satisfying culture that draws upon selective understandings of the past to posit a way forward for the future. In this chapter, the authors find remarkable comparisons between Vietnam (Hội An), Italy (Pietrelcina), and the USA (Tucson, Arizona) in which food and food-based festivals are deployed within broader preservation initiatives to emotionally, socially, and even physically move diverse groups of stakeholders within societies suffering from socioeconomic stresses into favorable and productive engagements with each other. The authors argue that food represents heritage in action in three ways: First, as an element of heritage, food moves through time as it is reinvented, reconceptualized, and, in certain places like Pietrelcina and Tucson, recultivated after years of falling out of favor. Second, food moves locals emotionally, tugging at their memories, conveying value-based moral claims concerning their society, and bringing them together in festivals, pilgrimages, and community gardening projects. Finally, the same foodstuffs move through space in their communities of origin and circulate abroad, creating equally moving tourist imaginaries and associations that serve to put these places on the map. All of these movements help to foster more sustainable and engaged revitalization programs. Grounded in anthropological theory and long-term engagement in heritage conservation initiatives, the authors present a model of how heritage (and its associated heritage tourism) can positively impact local communities in intangible ways that go beyond mere economic benefits to sustainably reorient and re-center the identity and values of communities struggling with ways to remain relevant and viable amid the upheavals of globalization and modernization.

Religious sites seem to have always been viewed as profitable and popular loci for heritage and heritage tourism as they are highly affective mediators (between people, places, and the divine) deeply implicated in a society’s cosmology and values, and often attest to important syncretisms and networks of socio-cultural exchange. However, this chapter argues that extreme tensions may arise at the popular level when heritage practitioners attempt to transition a site from a locus of popular religion—with its own specific style of embodied devotion practices—to one of modern heritage and tourism. Tracing the theological and philosophical turns of thought underlying both (pre-Tridentine) popular devotion and (post-Enlightenment) heritage tourism, and based on long-term ethnographic research in Italy, this chapter examines the contemporary difficulties religious site managers in the Italian pilgrimage town of San Giovanni Rotondo have encountered in turning their shrine to twentieth century stigmatic and saint Padre Pio of Pietrelcina into a modern cultural heritage site akin to Assisi, which, in the popular imaginary, is more famous for its UNESCO-designated art and architecture than it is of its extremely influential saint, Francis of Assisi. The author argues that, to mitigate such tensions, more ethnographic attention should be paid to the divergent goals and values of popular religion and popular heritage, and to the oft-conflicting ways in which pilgrims and heritage tourists and practitioners discipline their bodies and senses to achieve these objectives.