One might be familiar with the above transformation when one wanders too close to a black hole but there’s more physical properties to ponder in pasta that touch on the broader mysteries of the Cosmos. Noting the expertise required to produce the finest and most delicate varieties of angel hair, researchers applied science to create a matrix of nano-noodles to study the limits of dough and starch, inadvertently finding the resulting pasta to have enhanced stiffness and with possible applications as a biodegradable substitute for plastic. Enduring conundrums also present themselves in the form of the slurping problem—and variants—and Richard Feynman’s obsessive quandaries (previously) over why dry spaghetti always snapped in two and the physics behind stress and tension, which after a quarter of a century yielded a three way fracture with some mechanical finesse. More from BBC contributor Joseph Howlett at the link above.
synchronoptica
one year ago: World Puppetry Day (with synchronoptica), the Loyalty Order (1947) plus a Disneyland Dream (1956)
seven years ago: Karl Marx pedestrian signals, Tanglewood Tales plus Lewis Carroll’s logic game
eight years ago: assorted links worth revisiting
nine years ago: pixelated palettes plus artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder
ten years ago: Russian disinformation campaigns, the Reeperbahn and the Order of the Garter, more links to revisit plus Frida Kahlo in Detroit