TODAY reporter Alessandra Bulow speaks with Prof. Jörn Dunkel about how he and his colleagues figured out how to snap a strand of spaghetti without it shattering into many pieces. Bulow notes that the noodles must be bent and twisted at the same time, and “you have to twist really strongly,” explains Dunkel.
UPI reporter Brooks Hays writes that MIT researchers have successfully snapped a strand of spaghetti into only two pieces, solving an age-old mystery about why dry spaghetti noodles typically break into many pieces. “Scientists believe the discovery could help material scientists control for the fracturing patterns in other materials,” explains Hays.
A study by MIT researchers shows that by twisting and bending dry spaghetti past a certain angle, the noodles can be successfully split into two pieces, reports Travis Anderson for The Boston Globe. Anderson explains that the breakthrough, “could have implications far beyond the kitchen,” and could shed light on crack formation and how to control fractures in rod-like materials.
New Scientist reporter Frank Swain writes that MIT researchers have snapped dry spaghetti into two pieces, shedding light on the “conditions under which similar materials, such as steel rods in buildings, fracture under stress.” Prof. Jörn Dunkel explains that the spaghetti challenge has perplexed scientists for years, as it’s “one of those intrinsically interesting things that goes on around us.”
Prof. John Bush speaks with Popular Science reporter Dyani Sabin about the physics behind bending a soccer ball like a World Cup player. “The physics is rather complicated honestly, but there are simple ways to explain it,” says Bush. “The reason it looks mysterious is because you can’t see what the surrounding fluid, in this case air, is doing.”
Graduate student John Urschel appears on the Scientific American podcast My Favorite Theorem, where he shares his love of a theorem for graph theory developed by Daniel Spielman. Urschel points out that Spielman is “one of the first people to give provable guarantees for algorithms that can solve a Laplacian system of equations in near linear time.”
Cindy Atoji Keene of The Boston Globe speaks with MIT alumnus Niman Kenkre, who has been a high-stakes professional poker player for 12 years. Crediting his mathematic skills and sense of human psychology for his success, Kenkre says, “a player who relies only on mathematics will miss many important psychological cues relating to player frequencies and tendencies.”
MIT graduate student John Urschel describes the appeal of chess to HuffPost's Zach Young. "You might think someone who spends his days studying Laplacian eigenvectors would pick a hobby that’s a little more restful on the brain," writes Young. "But for Urschel, the appeal of math and the appeal of chess are very similar."
Boston Globe reporter Jeremy Fox writes about a new study by MIT researchers examining whether math games can be beneficial in helping children learn. The researchers found that, “children who played math games consistently showed a better grasp of the concepts…but that understanding did not appear to help in elementary school.”
New Scientist reporter Evelyn Wang writes that a study by MIT researchers finds that, “the question of whether a scrambled Rubik’s cube of any size can be solved in a given number of moves is what’s called NP-complete – that’s maths lingo for a problem even mathematicians find hard to solve.”
MIT was named the top university in the world for the sixth consecutive year in the QS World University Rankings, reports Kyle Scott Clauss for Boston Magazine.
Joshua Cassidy of KQED highlights an MIT study about how cats use their tongues to drink. The researchers created a model that mimics how cats drink and determined that “house cats tend to lap water about four times a second while larger species of cats, like lions and tigers, lap slower as their body mass increases.”
In this episode of NOVA that explores how origami is being used in scientific innovations, Prof. Erik Demaine speaks about his work applying math to create new origami figures. “It’s mind blowing that the simple operation of folding lets you transform a boring square of paper into super complicated, crazy 3-D shapes," he explains.
Research by Prof. Erik Demaine looks to find the best method for wrapping spherical objects, writes Sophie Bushwick for Popular Science. By examining how an Austrian candy maker wraps round candies, Demaine found that foil is the best material as “it makes lots of little tiny crinkles, or folds.”
Washington Post reporter Nick Anderson writes that four MIT students - Matthew Cavuto, Zachary Hulcher, Kevin Zhou and Daniel Zuo - have been named recipients of the prestigious Marshall scholarships. The MIT group is “the largest delegation of Marshall Scholars named this year from a single school.”