The Perfect sandcastle..

Yeah publish it in OCTOBER..well done you fools.



perfectsandcastle



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Recipe for sand castles: 8 parts sand, 1 part water
October 3, 2005
Any child knows how hard it is to build a sand castle without water. But now, thanks to a team of local researchers, science is a step closer to knowing why. By observing piles of wet glass beads in a rotating drum, scientists at Clark University and MIT have developed a model that can predict the stability of a pile of granules by considering the geometry of the grains and the liquid bridges that form both at the surface and inside the pile. The research has practical implications, for instance, for civil engineers designing retaining walls to keep out floods.

BOTTOM LINE: The sturdiest sandcastles will be roughly eight parts sand; one part water.

CAUTIONS: Unlike the glass beads used in these experiments, natural grains may not be perfectly spherical. ''In a real pile, these things are not neatly arranged in pyramids like the ones we are considering," Arshad Kudrolli of Clark University, the study's lead author, said.

WHAT'S NEXT: In addition to investigating how well the model fits irregularly shaped or multi-sized grains, the researchers would like to know more about the physics of how a grain pile collapses.

WHERE TO FIND IT: Nature Physics, October 2005
EMILY ANTHES