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M&M's Pack Tighter Than Gumballs
icantblvitsnotbutter writes "In a rather humorous article, the New York Times reports that M&M's pack more tightly than gumballs (registration, blah blah... alternate source here). The upshot of this is what it means for manufacturing denser glass (here, the generic term for solids made of random arrangements of molecules). Some basic solid geometry and tongue-in-cheek quotes fill out the story, but the immediate applications are mind-boggling for the next time you grab munchies on a road trip."
They all have the same density when they come out of me :)
That's why Peanut M&Ms exist, so they can make the bag look just as full as regular M&Ms, but with less chocolate!
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
But what about Peanut M&M's?
And mini-M&Ms can be packed even tighter! And ya know what - if you crush them into smaller fragments, you can pack those even tighter!
Does anybody else feel insulted that this "story" was even posted here?
and then I'll be impressed.
perhaps this means we'll soon see more glass stuff, I like the feel of glass over plastic and such. beyond that, it would be cool to see glass replacing other materials. How about a glass computer case, or glass engines.
"The Most Fun Possible on 4 wheels" is at SunBuggy in Las Vegas
For those too lazy/rushed to RTFA, the key point of this research is this:
Given a load of spheres, shaking them about won't get them packed as tight as if you stacked them all up neatly by hand. But take a load of squashed spheres (e.g. M&Ms) and shake them about randomly, and they take up much less room, because they naturally find a good formation. Even better if they're asymetrical in another dimension too (e.g. nutty M&Ms).
Yeah, great. But I suppose it's important to someone to know what shape will find its way into tight formations best.
Have they figured out if the melt in your hand at all?
Or where the mutant blue M&M's came from?
Or why M&M's are now missing their colors?
Personally, I bet the new blue M&M's stole the colors from the rest of them. They are probably holding the color's hostage. They even put out a out a ransom for them! Luckly atleast the orange color has been found according to authorities.
[/hat:tinfoil state="off"]
Norris/Palin 2012
Fact: We deserve leaders who can kick your ass and field dress your carcass.
I much prefer a glass dagger. or glass greaves!
A glass suit of armour is one to cherish, I can tell you that.
Denser packing of powders in sintered materials should improve their strength. But I bet the ultimate properties of materials made with ellipsoidal powders will be more complex than predicted from the packing density.
Granular materials tend to be weakest at the grain interfaces. Such materials tend to fail by breaking the grain-to-grain contacts, rather than shearing through the grains themselves. Thus, the geometry of the contact points will play a big role in the material's strength. I'd bet that ellipsoidal particle aggregates have more contact points because the elongated grains reach across the aggregate to touch more other grains. This should increase strength (materialsmade from ellipsoidal powers will be eve stronger than expected).
But the story might be even more complicated if large collections of grains have correlated orientations. If all of the grains in a region are oriented in the same way, that region will have highly anisotropic properties (extra weak in some directions and extra strong in other). Parts made with ellisoidal powders may have nonuniform strength in two senses. First, the parts may be weak in some directions, stronger in others(very good or very bad depending on how the design handles strength vis a vis the particle orientations). Second, if the packing orientations vary from part to part (or within macroscopic domains in parts), then the parts may vary in strength across different parts or across batches of parts (bad because inconsistent quality is bad).
Interesting story, but more research is needed.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Hi. I'm Troy McClure. You might remember me from such candy-packing films as "Don't Break the Pixie Sticks" and "990 Milk Duds per Cubic Metre". I hereby deny that I was ever in "Fudge Packin'"
I ab ferifying thif af I fpeak!
M&Ms are also denser because gumballs are hollow.
I mean, duh.
If you have a box filled with big and little spheres the big pieces will rise to the top when shaken.
Yet if you have a cone with the point down, the big pieces will sink to the bottom.
For some reason this makes sense in my mind but I am not sure why.
Stacked neatly, the spheroids still take up 74 percent of the space, just like spheres. But in random arrangements, computer simulations and experiments with M&M's showed that spheroids could be packed much more densely, filling up to 71 percent of the space.
Umm, 71 percent is less dense than 74 percent. Yay for innumeracy!
Coding theory has many results based on sphere packing, computational chemistry deals with this kind of vast configuration space, and stochasitic algorithms often depend on properties of randomized configuration spaces. In other words, everyone return to their zsh and PHP scripts, nothing to see here but some real computer science.
To those who remain this result ought to be unsurprising: the non-spherical M&Ms have a larger configuration space, because orientation (and not just position) of the M&M also matters.
While the research ended with M&M's, it started with peas. Dr. Paul M. Chaikin, a professor of physics at Princeton, assigned an undergraduate student, Evan A. Variano, to reproduce the work of an 18th-century English clergyman, Stephen Hales, who studied the packing of spheres with peas. Hales soaked the peas, which swelled and deformed, allowing him to see the precise arrangement of each pea with its neighbors.
The fellow who [has appeared to have] solved the problem of three-dimensional sphere packing is named Tom Hales, late of Michigan, but now at Pitt.
Tom - if you're following this thread: Are you any relation to Stephen Hales?
Umm, 71 percent is more dense than 64 percent. Yay for illiteracy.
Starbursts pack even denser than M&M's. Apparently using a square shape that stacks up perfectly with adjacent candies works even better than a rounded shape.
The # of peanut M&Ms in a 49.3g bag ranges from 19-25. Why is this?
Or why M&M's are now missing their colors?
It's rumored to be a co-promotion with Shady Records. You see, Eminem has white skin but acts black. Notice that the black-and-white M&M's candies have a backwards 'E' written on them, which is Eminem's logo.
Ok, but does the artcile mean random shapes would be more efficient yet? Allowing even more packing into empty space?
Here's to losing my Karma Bonus again....
This sounds like a job for a few trillion nano-bots... Now they really need to get the ball rolling on consructing a nano sized robot that can have enough limited intelligence to stack particles :)
Who needs WiFi when we can have Packet Over Sheep! http://datacomm.org/PoS-InternetDraft.txt