Spaghetti Enigma

I expect the puzzling problem of why dry spaghetti breaks into more than just two pieces has been keeping many of you awake at night. Apparently it bothered Richard Feynman, too. Well, sweet dreams await you now that structural analysis and high-speed photography have conclusively proven that

the initial break sends waves rippling down the length of the pasta. This wave boosts the curvature of the already bent pasta, triggering a cascade of other breakages, which, in turn, trigger more waves, causing the strand to fragment.

This makes me nostalgic for the days when I had to write a computer program to predict the speed at which a construction worker backed into a steel cable across an elevator shaft before the eye bolts in the concrete would bend enough to let the cable slide off, sending him to his death 10 stories below. Those were the days. And if you find this study fascinating -- and I doubt you do, but what the heck -- you might also be interested in why the shower curtain billows inward instead of outward.