As we are Sunday, you might have more time to spend in your kitchen than during week days. So try a little experiment: take a dry spaghetti, and bend it until it cracks. How many pieces do you think you'll get? Two? Wrong. An uncooked spaghetti can break into three, seven or even ten pieces, but rarely two. It's even rumored that Nobel laureate and physicist Professor Richard Feynman has used lots of pasta to solve this mystery. But now, according to ABC Science Online in "Cracked! The secret life of spaghetti," two French physicists say the answer is related to elastic waves travelling along the pasta when dry spaghetti is bent and suddenly released at one end. And don't think this is a minor discovery: the researchers think their findings can be applied to civil engineering to make structures like buildings and bridges more stable. Read more on ZDNet's Emerging Technology Trends.
Sources: Judy Skatssoon, Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), Science Online, September 7, 2005; and various web sites
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