Book excerpt: This volume consists of the state-of-the-art reports on new developments in micromechanics and the modeling of nanoscale effects, and is a companion book to the recent Kluwer volume on nanomechanics and mul- scale modeling (it is entitled Trends in Nanoscale Mechanics). The two volumes grew out of a series of discussions held at NASA Langley Research Center (LaRC), lectures and other events shared by many researchers from the national research laboratories and academia. The key events include the 2001 Summer Series of Round-Table Discussions on Nanotechnology at ICASE Institute (NASA LaRC) organized by Drs. V. M. Harik and M. D. Salas and the 2002 NASA LaRC Workshop on Multi-scale Modeling. The goal of these interactions was to foster collaborations between academic researchers and the ICASE Institute (NASA LaRC), a universi- based institute, which has pioneered world-class computational, theoretical and experimental research in the disciplines that are important to NASA. Editors gratefully acknowledge help of Ms. E. Todd (ICASE, NASA LaRC), the ICASE Director M. D. Salas and all reviewers, in particular, Dr. B. Diskin (ICASE/NIA, NASA LaRC), Prof. R. Haftka (University of Florida), Dr. V. M. Harik (ICASE/Swales Aerospace, NASA LaRC), Prof.