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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: 3, Interesting) by fritsd on Friday August 17 2018, @02:17PM (1 child)
There's a series of 3 books, "de natuurkunde van 't vrije veld" [wikipedia.org] (in Dutch) where everyday as well as rare weather phenomena are studied and explained, especially rainbows and such.
Unfortunately the author, Marcel Minnaert, managed to oscillate between fascist politics and communist politics at exactly the wrong time during and between the world wars,
so that he was persona non grata and in jail most of the time. He was lucky not to be executed by the Nazis during WWII, but afterwards he was too left-wing for the Dutch US-loving government during the Cold War, and moved back to Belgium.
I guess my school was fortunate to have his books in the dustier shelves of the school library :-)
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Saturday August 18 2018, @09:08AM
... Concord California public library back around 1974. It was fascinating.
For example it's easy to demonstrate that small bubbles _always_ have higher pressure than large bubbles!
Prepare a metal tube with an air valve in the middle. On each side of the valve is a tee that enables you to blow bubbles on each end. Each tee also has a valve on its stem so you can shut it after bubble inflation.
Open the middle valve. Voila!
The small bubble empties in the big one! How cool is that?
The whole book is like that. Quite a lot of it is explained with real experiments that schoolchildren can actualy do _themselves_.
A while back I used the library's online catalog to search for it but I don't think they have it anymore. That's a damn shame. Perhaps I can find it on Alibris, or through a rare books dealer.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]