Submitted via IRC for Fnord666
Pasta purists insist on plonking dry spaghetti into the boiling pot whole, but should you rebel against convention and try to break the strands in half, you'll probably end up with a mess of scattered pieces.
[...] It wasn't until 2006 that a pair of French physicists successfully explained the dynamics at work and solved the mystery. They found that, counterintuitively, a spaghetti strand produces a "kick back" traveling wave as it breaks. This wave temporarily increases the curvature in other sections, leading to many more breaks.
[...] This isn't just fun and games for the sake of idle curiosity (not that there's anything wrong with that). A collaboration between Audoly and Columbia University computer scientist Eitan Grinspun led to developing an Adobe paint brush that bends and moves, introduced in Adobe Illustrator 5 and Adobe Paint Brush 5. The MIT scientists say their new work could be used to better understand how cracks form and spread in similarly structured materials and brittle structures—bridge spans, for instance, or human bones. The secret could lie in the pasta.
Source: MIT scientists crack the case of breaking spaghetti in two
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 17 2018, @02:19AM (5 children)
Saw this in the queue earlier and found the original paper abstract,
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/08/09/1802831115 [pnas.org]
"Controlling fracture cascades through twisting and quenching"
On a personal note I was visiting a friend at MIT, probably sometime in the 1990s(?). He had managed to check out a very expensive high speed solid-state camera from his lab, for the evening. It had a dishwasher-sized box of DRAM for image storage and with enough light and small image it claimed 1000 frames per second. We tried to catch spaghetti breaking, from memory up to 400 frames/sec (all the light we had available). All we could get was one frame unbroken and in the next frame three pieces.
It never occurred to us to add torsional stress, although both of us had taken strength of materials classes.
(Score: 0, Offtopic) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday August 17 2018, @02:23AM (2 children)
You had the FRONT PAGE, BOLD TYPE, you had to BE a BIG SHOT LAST NIGHT !
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 17 2018, @02:37AM (1 child)
Give up that lightweight pop shit, try some real American original music, say,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXP84ijiLbg [youtube.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 17 2018, @02:40AM
If you don't get the link then you are allowed to cheat,
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Friday August 17 2018, @02:52AM (1 child)
Smarter Every Day got it some time ago, I think working with The Slow Mo Guys.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by iWantToKeepAnon on Friday August 17 2018, @08:35PM
"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." -- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy