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posted by mrpg on Friday August 17 2018, @02:11AM   Printer-friendly
from the bene dept.

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


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  • (Score: 1) by ShadowSystems on Friday August 17 2018, @03:18AM (1 child)

    by ShadowSystems (6185) <ShadowSystemsNO@SPAMGmail.com> on Friday August 17 2018, @03:18AM (#722673)

    I solved the "stuff going everywhere" problem back when I was a kid.
    I left the stuff in a ZipLock freezer bag, left the bag vented at one corner of the zip strip, then smashed the stuff inside with a hammer.
    The bent hole let out the pressure so the bag didn't go boom, the plastic kept the bits from going everywhere, & I could pour from the bag to the pot with ease.
    Want the spaghetti noodles in only two halves?
    Only hit it once with the hammer dead center.
    Job done!
    Plus I got to smash stuff with a hammer, so win all the way 'round! =-D

  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 17 2018, @03:25AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 17 2018, @03:25AM (#722677)

    No doubt fun to use a hammer in the kitchen, but,

    > The bent[vent] hole let out the pressure so the bag didn't go boom, ...

    Why would you think that breaking pasta would increase the pressure in the bag? Assuming you zipped it fairly tightly over the bunch of noodles, that bag would have to be inflated to be sort-of-spherical before it was in danger of popping.