Fasting-breaking research on breaking (and flying!) spaghetti

By Nick Matzke
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It's official. Flying Spaghetti Monsterism has now produced more original peer-reviewed research than "intelligent design" (aka "creintelligent designationism"). Don't believe me? Well, look at these:

Audoly, B., and S. Neukirch. 2005. "Fragmentation of rods by cascading cracks: Why spaghetti does not break in half." Physical Review Letters 85 (Aug. 26): 095505.

Gladden, J.R., N.Z. Handzy, A. Belmonte, and E. Villermaux. 2005. "Dynamic buckling and fragmentation in brittle rods." Physical Review Letters 94 (Jan. 28): 035503.

How bent spaghetti break
http://www.lmm.jussieu.fr/spaghetti/index.html

Dynamic Buckling and Breaking of Thin Rods
http://www.math.psu.edu/belmonte/spaghetti.html

Hat-tip to Peter Weiss of Science News, in his online article "That's the Way the Spaghetti Crumbles," Science News, 168(20), p. 315 (Nov. 12, 2005).