Scientists have made a spaghetti breakthrough, which has MIT researchers adding a twist to an age-old problem, BGR.com noted.
For hundreds of years people have been faced with the ultimate decision: plonk the full-length dry spaghetti strands in a pot of water to cook or snap them in half first?
Both options come with their disadvantages.
Unless you have a massive cauldron, the chances are you are not going to get the full-length spaghetti to fit into a pot all at once, leaving you with inconsistently cooked strands.
On the other hand, if you snap the dry spaghetti in half, you will be left with uneven strands and dozens of tiny splinters flying around the kitchen.
MIT scientists resolved this issue once and for all in a study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The research was not aimed specifically at spaghetti, although pasta did become the prime example as the team tried to address "a well-known problem with direct implications for the fracture behavior of elongated brittle objects."
The researchers noted that this was something that perplexed physicist and Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman, who observed that dry spaghetti "almost always breaks into three or more pieces when exposed to large bending stresses."
An explanation for this phenomenon was proposed in a 2005 paper, which put it down to a burst of flexural waves being created during the sudden "relaxation of the curvature" of the spaghetti strand.
The theory is that secondary waves increased the curvature in the spaghetti strand, which caused it to fragment when bent.
This is all good and well, but what exactly is the correct way to break spaghetti then?
MIT researchers suggest rotating the two ends of the pasta while breaking them.
"The secret is that you have to twist it a fair amount," graduate student Vishal Patil from MIT told Gizmodo. "The energy from the fracture gets divided into the twist."
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