Science has been trying to break a dry noodle in two for years without breaking it into three or more pieces. Scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have reached the net thanks to running & # 39;
Last week, MIT researchers succeeded in explaining a scientific mystery: how to prevent a spaghetti from breaking into pieces if it tries to divide it by means.
Make the attempt. Take a spaghetti, uncooked (of course), from your pantry. Try splitting it in half. He can not do it, right? Not only did you encounter that stone, scientists such as the famous physicist Richard Feynman were also in trouble when they did the same test. And is that folding one of these in two without breaking into three or more pieces seemed impossible until researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) found a way to break them in two, bending and turn. dry noodles (Read: more than 200 experts reach a scientific milestone: complete the wheat genome)
The trick, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in something that the authors & # 39; the torsion & # 39; to mention . This is to turn a noodle more than a certain critical side and then slowly fold it in two. That way, the scientists say, the spaghetti will break in two. The only drawback is that it is not so easy to reach home.
Because spaghetti had to be turned to more than 270 degrees, scientists needed a machine that was made at MIT for this particular task, because turning it by hand is not enough to generate such force. And, although it sounds too much, this experiment could have more applications, not just in [culinary curiosities].
According to the researchers, this could improve the understanding of crack formation and the control of fractures in others. Rod-like materials such as multifiber structures, engineered nanotubes or even microtubules in cells. "It will be interesting to see if, and how, torsion can be used in a similar way to control the fracture dynamics of two-dimensional and three-dimensional materials," co-author Jörn Dunkel associate professor of Applied Mathematical Physics at MIT , to the portal of this American university.
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