BREAKING NEWS! WITH A SURPRISING TWIST! Spaghetti—dry spaghetti—again feeds the intellectual fervor of physicists. Five physicists serve up a surprising new study about an old question about bending a strand past its breaking point: “Controlling Fracture Cascades Through Twisting and Quenching,” Ronald H. Heisser, Vishal P. Patil, Norbert Stoop, Emmanuel Villermaux, and Jörn Dunkel, Proceedings […]
Tag: break
Physics of how to break a wishbone
Engineers at the University of Michigan show and tell (and add excess music to the showing and telling) how best, in their professional view, to break a turkey wishbone: (Thanks to investigator Gary Dryfoos for bringing this to our attention.) Here is a demonstration, by investigators elsewhere, of how not to take advantage of the physics […]
Further past investigations of spaghetti
Investigating how and why a strand of uncooked spaghetti breaks after bending — well that’s a complicated undertaking, with a rich history. One man’s take appears in this writeup: “The dynamics of linear spaghetti structures — how one thing just leads to another,” RWD Nickalls, 14 June, 2006. The author is at the Department of Anaesthesia, […]
How Ig Nobellian Dr. Fesmire broke his ankle, told with dolls
Behold Ig Nobel Prize winner Dr. Francis Fesmire tell the tantalizing tale of how he broke his ankle in the Samaria Gorge on the Greek Isle of Crete. Dr. Fesmire accomplished the telling in a mere 14 minutes and 58 seconds, assisted by dolls: BONUS: Dr. Fesmire’s Ig Nobel Prize winning study “Termination of Intractable Hiccups with […]