For those of you who take sandcastle building very seriously, listen up: MIT engineers now say you can trust a very simple equation to calculate the force required to push a shovel—and any other "intruder"— through sand. ...
Condensed Matter
Aug 29, 2016
0
19
For the first time, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) researchers have measured how forces move through 3D granular materials, determining how this important class of materials might pack and behave in processes ...
General Physics
Aug 24, 2016
1
329
There is an important difference between knowing something and being able to prove something. Even in science, there are ideas that everyone shares, but which no one can prove. The link between disorder and metastability ...
Condensed Matter
May 19, 2016
0
18
Duke graduate student Yuchen Zhao has spent the last year studying such "sandcastles of stars"—towers crafted from hundreds of six-armed stars or "hexapods" which bear a remarkable resemblance to the jacks you might have ...
General Physics
May 11, 2016
2
127
Sand, rocks, grains, salt or sugar are what physicists call granular media. A better understanding of granular media is important - particularly when mixed with water and air, as it forms the foundations of houses and off-shore ...
General Physics
Mar 26, 2015
0
11
Pick up a handful of sand, and it flows through your fingers like a liquid. But when you walk on the beach, the sand supports your weight like a solid. What happens to the forces between the jumbled sand grains when you step ...
General Physics
Mar 5, 2015
1
57
Gabriel Caballero Robledo from the Center for Research and Advanced Studies (CINVESTAV)at Monterrey, Mexico, is working on the design of a small medical device capable of detecting allergies or diseases quickly and at a low ...
Bio & Medicine
Feb 9, 2015
0
30
Pour sand from a bucket and it flows like a liquid, but stand on it and it supports weight like a solid. This unusual behavior is a property of granular materials, and it is one of the reasons Heinrich Jaeger, the William ...
Condensed Matter
Feb 14, 2014
0
0
When confronted with a heavy load or deformed by stress, the individual particles in a granular material will sometimes reorganize to a more stable arrangement. At small scales these reorganizations are little more than the ...
Earth Sciences
Feb 7, 2014
0
0
In some ways, granular material—such as a pile of sand—can behave much like a crystal, with its close-packed grains mimicking the precise, orderly arrangement of crystalline atoms. Now researchers at MIT have pushed that ...
General Physics
Aug 5, 2013
2
0
