China May Soon Have a Second (Artificial) Moon

A city in China may soon have a second moon in its evening sky.

Credit: Shutterstock

Moonlit skies over the Chinese city of Chengdu may soon get a boost from a second moon.

City officials recently announced plans to build an artificial moon, launching it to hang over Sichuan province's capital city by 2020, Chinese news site People's Daily Online (PDO) reported.

The illuminated orb is intended to complement the light of Earth's existing moon, and will be eight times brighter than the natural satellite, Wu Chunfeng, chairman of Chengdu Aerospace Science and Technology Microelectronics System Research Institute Co. Ltd. (CASC) — the primary contractor for the Chinese space program — told PDO. [Photos: Mysterious Objects Spotted on the Moon]

In fact, light from the artificial moon is expected to save the city money by doing away with the need for streetlights, Chunfeng added. The new moon will be capable of illuminating an area of up to 50 miles (80 kilometers) in diameter, according to PDO.

Though the human-made moon will light up only Chengdu, the glowing ball will be visible across China and even overseas, Asia Times reported. The real moon, of course, can usually be seen from anywhere on Earth. But little is known about the height, size and true brightness of the proposed artificial moon — all of which are factors that could affect its visibility to distant observers.

It is also unknown if the project has secured official support from the city of Chengdu or the federal government, The Guardian reported.

This isn't the first time that a country has tried to outshine the moon. A similar project was unveiled by Russia in the 1990s, with the launch of a solar reflecting system — a "space mirror" — intended to produce light "equivalent to three to five full moons" covering an area approximately 3 miles (5 kilometers) in diameter, the New York Times reported in 1993.

Another Russian attempt to launch a space mirror in 1999 fizzled before it got off the ground, according to The Guardian.

"A dusk-like glow"

Regarding concerns about the Chinese artificial moon interfering with astronomical observations or disrupting animals that are active at night, Kang Weimin, the director of the Institute of Optics of the Harbin Institute of Technology in China, said that the light would amount to only a "dusk-like glow," PDO reported.

However, research has shown that many animals are highly sensitive to the light and phases of the moon. For example, nocturnal eagle owls communicate with each other through the display of white throat feathers, and scientists have found this activity increases during the full moon, when moonlight is brightest.

And in Australia's Great Barrier Reef, hundreds of coral species simultaneously release their eggs and sperm in an annual mass spawning event linked to the level of moonlight.

The size and illumination technology of Chengdu's artificial moon are not yet available, so it remains unclear if the brightness of the proposed artificial satellite would indeed be intense enough to interfere with the routines of local wildlife. In addition, while the company is calling it a "satellite," which suggests that it will be launched into geostationary orbit — in which the orb circles the Earth above the equator — no details have been released about how the company plans to deploy the "artificial moon."

Stephen Hawking's 1st Wife Blasts Biopic 'The Theory of Everything'

Stephen Hawking with Jane Wilde Hawking Jones (left) and guests attend the EE British Academy Film Awards at the Royal Opera House on Feb. 8, 2015, in London.

Credit: David M. Benett/Getty images

Jane Hawking, the ex-wife of the late and renowned physicist Stephen Hawking, asserted that "The Theory of Everything," a film about the couple's life and family, got a lot wrong.

"Don't ever believe what you see in films," Jane Hawking said this week at the Henley Literary Festival in Oxfordshire, England, while promoting her new book, "Cry to Dream Again" (Alma Books, 2018), as reported by The Guardian.

The film, released in 2014, was based on Jane Hawking's memoir "Travelling to Infinity: My Life with Stephen" (Alma Books, 2008) and starred Eddie Redmayne as Stephen and Felicity Jones as Jane. [In Photos — 'Theory of Everything': The Love Story of Stephen and Jane Hawking]

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Hawking, whose full name is Jane Beryl Wilde Hawking Jones, said she pleaded with the producers to stick closely to her memoir, but they didn't listen, and keeping the running time to a minimum meant there were inaccuracies. For instance, she said this week that the film glossed over the very real and all-consuming realities of caring for a husband with the incurable neurological disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).

The two were married in 1965, about two years after Stephen's ALS diagnosis. As the ALS progressed, Jane had to care for not only her husband but also their three young children, all the while attending physics conferences across the globe, The Guardian reported. (In fact, the couple spent their honeymoon at a physics conference at Cornell University in New York, she said.)

Stephen Hawking died on March 14, 2018, at the age of 76.

"I'm sorry to say that none of these extensive travels — with all the organizing, packing for a family with a severely disabled member, transporting them, driving them, as well as the usual day-to-day care — really appears in 'The Theory of Everything,'" Jane Hawking said.

"I asked for a frenzied fast-forward version — even simply getting all the suitcases, wheelchair and passengers in the car to represent this aspect of our lives — but I was told this was not possible because of the time constraints."

And while she and other close confidants may know the true story, the misconceptions and inaccuracies portrayed in the film will remain forever, she suggested. "I knew if there were mistakes in the film that they were going to be immortalized, which they have been," she said, as The Guardian reported.

Other inaccuracies and omissions in the film included the place the two first met — it was in St. Albans in Hertfordshire, England, not Cambridge University as the film portrayed — as well as all of the support she received from her parents while she struggled to care for a husband with deteriorating health. These aspects were overlooked in the film, she noted, as reported by the Australian news site news.com.au.

Apparently, the film also messed up the dissolution of the couple's marriage. Rather than a beautiful, teary-eyed and mutual breakup, as the film portrays, Jane's book reveals that it was a prolonged crumbling of a partnership that ended in a screaming fight on vacation, The Guardian reported.

Cassini's Death Dive into Saturn Reveals Weird Ring 'Rain' & Other Surprises

An artist's depiction of the Cassini mission during its "Grand Finale" in 2017.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

To distant, Earthling eyes, the gap between Saturn and its rings looks calm, like a deep breath of empty space between one beautifully intricate structure and another. But in 11 new papers, born from the demise of one of NASA's most beloved planetary science missions, scientists destroy that illusion, laying out a set of unexpectedly complicated phenomena dancing through that emptiness.

Those papers, published today in two key science journals, represent the first research to be published with data from the Cassini mission's so-called "Grand Finale," a daring set of orbits during which the spacecraft threaded itself between Saturn and its rings. Taken together, the papers paint a detailed picture of what's happening between the planet's innermost rings and its upper atmosphere — surprising, eye-catching phenomena like a pounding hail of compounds pummeling the planet's equatorial region and an electric current produced merely by the planet's winds and magnetic field.

"We really did think of it as a gap," Linda Spilker, project scientist for the Cassini mission at NASA, told Space.com of the region between Saturn and its rings. The team was optimistic about what Cassini could learn during its demise, but the operation ended up producing what she called "a much richer science return than we had imagined" — she went so far as to compare it to a brand-new mission. [Amazing Saturn Photos from NASA's Cassini Orbiter].

The Cassini spacecraft spent a total of 13 years studying Saturn and its moons. But when it was due to run out of fuel, the scientists behind the mission designed a daring trajectory that would send the spacecraft looping through Saturn's rings before burning up in its atmosphere. That destruction ensured that potentially habitable moons in the system wouldn't catch any Earth germs that might have hitched a ride aboard the spacecraft.

But it also let scientists squeeze a little extra data out of its instruments — and pushed the spacecraft further than they thought might be possible, since neither Cassini nor its instruments was designed to accomplish such an incredible feat. Scientists gathered for the first dive, wondering whether the spacecraft would survive long enough to even begin the Grand Finale.

Spilker and other Saturn scientists say the spacecraft's revelations sifted from the data are far from complete, even after the papers published today (Oct. 4). "You look at basically the firehose of data that's come back from Cassini in the past 13 years, really, we've only skimmed the cream across the top of the data set," Spilker said. That work has helped scientists begin to understand individual phenomena taking place at Saturn. "The next step that's happening even now is to take those pieces and put them together into a coherent picture to look across all of the data sets and ask is there one common story," Spilker said.

But in the meantime, here's a peek at what scientists have already learned about the ringed planet.

An artist's depiction of the Cassini spacecraft's view as it completed the "Grand Finale" of its mission in 2017.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

It's raining, it's pouring

One new discovery was prompted by instrument results so strange that scientists on the team and beyond it at first thought there had to be a mistake. That instrument, called the Ion and Neutral Mass Spectrometer, or INMS, can sniff out the chemical composition of material it catches.

Scientists are particularly excited to see these results because word had gotten out that the instrument was onto something. "Since the end of the mission, there's been a lot of talk about these INMS results," Bonnie Meinke, a Saturn scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute, who was not involved in any of the new research, told Space.com. "At first glance, it's the kind of thing that you almost don't believe, and as a scientist, you have to do a little gut check," Meinke said.

The instrument had a good track record, having gathered critical data earlier in the mission while Cassini explored moons like Titan and Enceladus. "Then we really got to focus in on Saturn and let it be the star for that final part of the mission," Rebecca Perryman, the operations lead for INMS at the Southwest Research Institute, told Space.com. "We'd done a lot of work to get everything planned initially and had really boasted that INMS would be able to get some fantastic results once we started dipping down into the atmosphere." [In Photos: Cassini Mission Ends with Epic Dive into Saturn]

They had expected those results to be measurements of the masses of "ring rain," which scientists knew as a trickle of tiny particles falling from Saturn's innermost ring down toward the planet's upper atmosphere — some hydrogen and helium mostly — nothing fancy.

But what they seem to have found was far more material than they had expected, coming from far more exotic compounds. The instrument spotted not just hydrogen and helium but also carbon monoxide, methane, nitrogen and the unidentifiable remains of organic molecules.

Other instruments suggested that this downpour also included water ice and silicate particles and showed that the downpour is triggered by the interaction of these particles with the highest levels of Saturn's atmosphere. Around the whole ring structure, it all adds up to somewhere around 10 tons (9,000 kilograms) per second.

"The complexity of what was going on there and the amount of material that was infalling was very surprising," Hunter Waite, the principal investigator on INMS and a scientist at the Southwest Research Institute, told Space.com. And the discovery doesn't just reveal an intriguing phenomenon about a distant world — scientists say that if the finding holds up, it might have much deeper implications in our own solar system and beyond.

Waite said that the unexpected diversity of compounds in the ring rain might affect scientists' estimates for the composition of the atmosphere, which could in turn mean adapting hypotheses about how Saturn and its neighbors formed and evolved. "It might just have this facade," Waite said of Saturn. "[That might have] been a little bit deceptive in steering our thinking about formation and evolution."

Moreover, because there's so very much of the material, the new results pose a puzzle: Where does it all come from? "This can't be a continuous process, or the rings wouldn't be there," Meinke said. They would run out of material in perhaps tens of thousands of years, leaving Saturn bare. "The real story that [the paper is] telling is about the churn of Saturn's rings … rings can be long-lived because they're constantly moving and turning over."

This Super-Strong Magnet Literally Blew the Doors Off a Tokyo Laboratory

Sparks flew when the Takeyama Lab magnet turned on in a recent experiment.

Credit: Shojiro Takeyama

There's a magnet in a secure room in central Tokyo. It's an electromagnet, the kind that generates a magnetic field when electrical current flows through it. The last time the scientists who operate it switched it on, it blew open the heavy doors designed to keep it contained. Already, it has created one of the most intense magnetic fields ever generated on Earth. And it keeps getting more powerful.

The magnetic field, which recently reached a strength of 1,200 teslas — a unit of magnetic intensity — was described in a paper published Sept. 17 in the journal Review of Scientific Instruments.

Twelve hundred teslas is an enormous measurement. The most powerful magnet most people have any chance of encountering in their lifetime is inside an MRI machine — and the most advanced, powerful, sometimes dangerous MRIs in the world clock in at just 3 teslas. In 2004, Popular Mechanics magazine described a machine billed as "the world's most powerful magnet" — meaning the most powerful magnet that doesn't tear itself to bits whenever it's turned on — and it emitted just 45 teslas. That's less than 4 percent of the power emitted by the magnet created by lead author Shojiro Takeyama and his colleagues.

And crossing the 1,000-tesla mark is a major milestone in an engineering effort that Takeyama said dated back to the 1970s, and which he has led for the last two decades.

To achieve that intensity, Takeyama and his team pump megajoules of energy into a small, precisely engineered electromagnetic coil, the inner lining of which then collapses on itself at Mach 15 — that's more than 3 miles per second (5 kilometers per second). As it collapses, the magnetic field inside gets squeezed into a tighter and tighter space, until its force peaks at a tesla reading unimaginable in conventional magnets. Fragments of a second later, the coil collapses entirely, destroying itself. [Mad Geniuses: 10 Odd Tales About Famous Scientists]

The 1,200-tesla experiment required 3.2 megajoules of energy. But Takeyama, a physicist at the University of Tokyo, told Live Science that he believes his device can reach 1,800 teslas if he and his team apply 5 megajoules to it. (They're taking their time getting to that point, he said, partly due to safety concerns.)

"The most similar magnetic-field generation is by chemical explosives," Takeyama said, referring to experiments beginning in the 1960s and continuing until 2001, in which Russian and American researchers detonated explosives around electromagnets in order to squish them, briefly creating very powerful magnetic fields — up to 2,800 teslas.

"They cannot conduct these experiments in indoor laboratories, so they usually conduct everything in the outdoors, like Siberia in a field or somewhere in a very wide place at Los Alamos [New Mexico]," he said. "And they try to make a scientific measurement, but because of these conditions it's very hard to make precise measurements."

Other forms of superstrong magnetic fields require lasers, but Takeyama said that the laser-generated fields are tiny and supershort-lived, even by physics standards, making them similarly problematic for the sorts of experiments in which he and his laboratory colleagues at the University of Tokyo are interested.

The point of building a magnet in the 1,000-plus tesla range, Takeyama said, is to study hidden physical properties of electrons that are invisible under normal circumstances. He and his team will put different materials inside their magnet to study how their electrons behave.

Under those extreme conditions, he said, conventional models of electrons break down. Takeyama doesn't know exactly what happens to electrons in such extreme situations, but said that studying them in the moments before the coil's self-destruction should reveal properties of electrons normally invisible to science. Extremely powerful magnetic fields also have possible applications in fusion engineering, to keep the hot plasmas of a fusion reaction contained and far from their container walls.

The problem with building magnetic fields that powerful is that, as in the case of Takeyama's magnet, they almost, by definition, destroy themselves within moments of their creation. The field — and the process of creating it — inevitably exerts so much energy on the device generating it that at least some element of the device burns out or collapses on itself. Takeyama said that the advantage of his magnetic field is that it's relatively robust compared with fields generated by lasers or explosive devices. It's large enough to contain a substantial amount of material, requires no explosives and has a life span of a few dozen microseconds (millionths of a second). That's short in human terms, but it lasts several times longer than those laser-generated fields. [Top 10 Greatest Explosions Ever]

Also, while the coil itself is destroyed, the surrounding machine survives the process largely intact.

Here's what happened when it was powered up to 3.2 megajoules for the experiment that produced the 1,200-tesla field:

The device is contained and nondestructive compared with those explosive experiments in Siberia and Los Alamos. But still, every time the magnet is used, Takeyama and his team must enter the room and begin the long, laborious process of cleanup and repairs, he said. His research team must fabricate a new magnetic coil to exquisitely precise dimensions for each use. The typical wait time between experiments, he said, is about two to five months.

Outside researchers interested in elusive fusion-power generators have expressed interest in Takeyama's research as possibly useful for their large, magnetic plasma containment systems, he said. However, he said he's not certain how useful his fields might be in that context, nor is that his primary goal.

Down the road, he said, he expects to amp up the power on his machine, eventually maxing it out at the 5-megajoule, 1,800-tesla mark. But he's in no rush to get to that point, he said. First, he and his team want to explore as much as possible what they can learn at the 3.2-megajoule, 1,200-tesla range. And there remains the problem of safety as the energies involved increase.

For now, he said, his team has added some stronger doors to his lab.

Colorado Airport Receives FAA Spaceport License

An illustration of a potential future layout of the Colorado Air and Space Port, the former Front Range Airport near Denver that received an FAA spaceport license Aug. 17.

Credit: Colorado Air and Space Por

WASHINGTON — A Colorado airport has received a commercial spaceport license from the Federal Aviation Administration despite a lack of announced users of the site and concerns about conflicts with aviation.

The FAA's Office of Commercial Space Transportation awarded a launch site operator's license, more commonly known as a spaceport license, to the government of Adams County, Colorado, Aug. 17 for Front Range Airport. The airport will now be known as the Colorado Air and Space Port.

The facility is a general aviation airport east of Denver and about 10 kilometers southeast of Denver International Airport. It currently has two runways, each 2,400 meters long, as well as more than 3,000 acres of property for development. Reaction Engines, a British company working on a hypersonic engine known as SABRE, is building a facility there for testing engine technology.

The license is the culmination of several years of work by airport and local officials to win an FAA license. Advocates of what was previously known as Spaceport Colorado argued that establishing a commercial launch site would help bolster the state's growing space industry.

"Spaceport Colorado will leverage Colorado's leadership in aerospace and space exploration, our well-educated workforce, and our excellent higher learning institutions to attract new businesses and continue pushing the boundaries on what we can learn and accomplish in space," said Rep. Ed Perlmutter (D-Colo.) in a statement. "This spaceport designation brings with it many exciting opportunities, and I look forward to Colorado's continued engagement in the growing commercial space industry."

For now, though, the new spaceport designation only represents opportunity, rather than confirmed launch activity. No commercial launch companies have committed to operating from the spaceport, something its operators acknowledged in the announcement.

"The license from the FAA is an important step in the process, and we're looking forward to partnering with a company that shares our vision for the spaceport and the technological and commercial benefits it brings to Colorado," said Dave Ruppel, director of the Colorado Air and Space Port.

The spaceport's license supports operations of what is known in FAA parlance as "Concept X" vehicles. These are suborbital vehicles that take off from runways under jet power, like a conventional aircraft, and fly to some distance from the airport before igniting a rocket engine for the suborbital spaceflight phase of its mission. The vehicle then returns to make a horizontal landing either as a glider or under jet power.

However, no such vehicles are in active development today. Rocketplane Global was working on such a vehicle nearly a decade ago, called Rocketplane XP, but filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy liquidation in 2010. Air-launch systems that use a carrier aircraft to release a rocket-powered vehicle, like Virgin Galactic's WhiteKnightTwo/SpaceShipTwo system, are known as Concept Z vehicles at the FAA, and were not included in the environmental assessment developed as part of the licensing process.

The spaceport also faced criticism about the potential effects launches there could have on aviation activities at nearby Denver International Airport. The issue came up during a June 26 hearing by the House aviation subcommittee on commercial space transportation regulatory reform.

"I recently met — I won't say who it was — people raising concerns about the proximity of a proposed spaceport that does not have an operator, which is a 'build it and they will come' proximate to Denver International Airport, and the potential for interference with operations there," said Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.), ranking member of the full House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, at the hearing.

Tim Canoll, president of the Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA) and one of the witnesses at the hearing, said he was concerned that segregating spaceflight and aviation traffic would be an "order of magnitude more difficult" in that situation versus conventional launch sites.

Canoll noted it was difficult for ALPA to assess specific impacts of launches from the spaceport on operations at Denver International because any vehicle that does plan to use the spaceport will have to get a launch license from the FAA, a process that would include separate reviews of how it would affect airport operations. "It's hard for ALPA to comment on one or the other without seeing the full picture concept," he said. "The inability to match the two to one issue is where we're running into problems with giving good comments to the FAA as they consider these."

Lori Garver, the general manager of ALPA and former NASA deputy administrator, also mentioned concerns about launch operations from that proposed spaceport during a commercial space panel discussion at the organization's 2018 Air Safety Forum Aug. 1. "I called the folks that I've worked with over my career and were assured there are no operators planning to fly out of Denver," she said. "But it was hard for us to imagine, then, how they can just get a license."

Colorado Air and Space Port is not alone, though, among spaceports that lack space launches. Of the 10 other spaceports licensed by the FAA, three have yet to conduct a launch under an FAA license or experimental permit: Cecil Field in Jacksonville, Florida; Ellington Airport in Houston ; and Midland Air and Space Port in Midland, Texas . A fourth, Oklahoma Air and Space Port in Burns Flat, Oklahoma, hosted only three low-altitude test flights under experimental permits by Armadillo Aerospace in 2007.

The lack of activity has not deterred others from either seeking spaceport licenses for existing airports or developing entirely new commercial launch sites. "We're trying to stand up a spaceport. We're in very preliminary talks," said Julie Engel, president of Arizona's Greater Yuma Economic Development Corporation, during a space conference held at Arizona State University Aug. 20. She sought advice from the conference's luncheon speaker, Kevin O'Connell, new director of the Office of Space Commerce, on how to work with the government and convey the "seriousness of what we're trying to do."

This story was provided by SpaceNews, dedicated to covering all aspects of the space industry.

A Whole Lot of the Planet Is on Fire Right Now

An image of NASA's Worldview highlights in red regions of the planet where satellite thermal imagers detect actively burning fires.

Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center

A whole lot of planet Earth is burning right now.

In the U.S., record-setting wildfires in Western states dominate the headlines. But as a new image released by NASA's Worldview satellite imagery collection reveals, those fires represent just a fraction of the total portion of the planet that's dominated by fire right now. The image highlights in red all of the regions of the planet where satellites currently detect active fires — though NASA noted in a statement that not all of those red points are necessarily wildfires.

"Africa seems to have the most concentrated fires," NASA officials said in the statement. "This could be due to the fact that these are most likely agricultural fires ... Farmers often use fire to return nutrients to the soil and to clear the ground of unwanted plants."

So not all the fires in this burning world are out of control. But "while fire helps enhance crops and grasses for pasture, the fires also produce smoke that degrades air quality," NASA added.

And Africa hardly accounts for all of the flare-ups visible on this map.

North and South America, as well as Australia, have had widespread — and sometimes record-setting —wildfires this year, NASA officials said, as a result of warming temperatures and droughts linked to climate change, as well as forest mismanagement in some areas.

"For large areas in the north and west [in Australia]," NASA said, "bushfire season has been brought forward a whole two months to August — well into winter… According to the Australian Bureau of Meteorology … the January to July period 2018 was the warmest in [New South Wales] since 1910. As the climate continues to change and areas become hotter and drier, more and more extreme bushfires will break out across the entire Australian continent."

In an email to Live Science, NASA spokesperson Lynn Jenner said that the agency does not have an exact figure for the portion of the global landmass on fire at this time.

Researchers Solve Mystery of the Universe, Break Piece of Uncooked Spaghetti in Half

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When you study physics, you're bound to brush up against some of the universe's larger mysteries. What came before the Big Bang? What lies inside a black hole? Is it possible to break a stick of dry spaghetti into exactly two pieces?

Perhaps you've found yourself asking that last question in your own kitchen. Why is it that, when you try to snap a single piece of uncooked spaghetti in half, you almost always end up with three or more pieces of pasta clattering across your counter? It's a logic-defying phenomenon that has baffled chef and scholar alike for decades; even Nobel physics laureate Richard Feynman, who helped develop the atomic bomb during World War II, is said to have spent the better part of a night sitting in his kitchen, snapping spaghetti sticks and searching for an explanation. [The Mysterious Physics of 7 Everyday Things]

Feynman came up dry, so to speak — but finally, a new study published Monday (Aug. 13) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences provides some closure. With the help of some mathematical models and a spaghetti-bending robot, researchers at MIT have found that, yes, it is possible to break a piece of uncooked spaghetti into just two pieces, but there's a twist … literally. To prevent bent spaghetti from splintering into a half dozen pieces, the researchers wrote, one end of the pasta first has to be twisted nearly 360 degrees.

Or in more technical terms, the "results advance the general understanding of how twist affects fracture cascades," study co-author Jörn Dunkel, associate professor of physical applied mathematics at MIT, said in a statement. "In any case, this has been a fun interdisciplinary project started and carried out by two brilliant and persistent students — who probably don't want to see, break, or eat spaghetti for a while."

In their new study, the MIT researchers broke more than 350 sticks of Barilla-brand spaghetti and filmed the resulting fractures with an ultra-high-speed camera. To lend their carbo-rific trials complete precision, lead study author Ronald Heisser (now an engineering graduate student at Cornell University) built a special spaghetti-bending machine, complete with aluminum pincers that gripped each noodle on either end. In each experiment, a rod of spaghetti was loaded into the machine, twisted to a predetermined degree, then bent upward until it snapped. 

After much pasta destruction, the researchers discovered that they were consistently able to break individual pieces of spaghetti into exactly two pieces only when the machine twisted the noodles at least 250 degrees, then slowly bent them up to the breaking point. According to the researchers, these results were consistent across two spaghetti types (Barilla No. 5 and No. 7, which have slightly differing diameters) and agreed with a series of spaghetti-bending models the team ran before the experiments began.

So, why is the twist so important? According to the new study, the twist"enables the rod to store its energy in more than one mode." Consider that, when an untwisted rod first fractures, each half catapults backward in a burst of kinetic energy. A 2005 study found that this snap-back unleashes a wave of energy so powerful that it causes other stressed sections of the noodle to snap off as well. (That study won a 2006 Ig Nobel Prize, an annual parody award given to "improbable research.") This behavior is not exclusive to noodles, mind you, but is visible in many thin, rod-like structures — including Olympic vaulting poles. 

In a twisted noodle, however, much of that snap-back wave is transferred into a "twist wave" propagated through the noodle's uncoiling, the MIT researchers wrote. The force of the snap-back is therefore weakened, and less likely to result in any more fractures occurring.

"Once [the noodle] breaks, you still have a snap-back because the rod wants to be straight," Dunkel said. "But it also doesn’t want to be twisted."

So, yes: It is possible to break your noodle into two precise pieces. Feynman would be pleased. And while this finding may be no atomic bomb, it could help future researchers better understand the mechanics of fractures in general, and even aid in the design of fracture-resistant nanomaterials. Whether these findings apply to other types of pasta — say, bucatini — will require further study.