Current Events #1

     When one breaks spaghetti to make a dinner they usually take a handful of noodles to cook. But some, very curious, people see what it is like to break a single strand of spaghetti. Those who have done this know that this results in the strand breaking into multiple small pieces. This nature of spaghetti has been in the attention of MIT students as well. MIT graduate students, Ronald Heisser and Edgar Gridello, investigated this dilemma and used state of the art technology to create a solution to such pressing problem. Heisser and Gridello weren't trying to find out why a single strand of spaghetti does this as it already had an answer, rather, they were trying to find out if a single strand of spaghetti could be broken in half . What they came up with is quite ingenious, a single noodle must be twisted to be broken. Heisser and Gridello created a contraption with two clamps, one that would hold the strand in place and the another that would gently twist it 360° without breaking it. The two clamps slowly come closer together and the result is spaghetti perfectly broken in two.
Image result for mit spaghetti breaking
Heisser and Gridello's device
     My personal reflections on this is while this story may seem very silly it points out a significant aspect of what people can do with robotics, even robotics as simple as spaghetti breakers. The device that Heisser and Gridello made twists the spaghetti without breaking it. Normal humans would have a very hard time twisting spaghetti with one hand only, let alone to 360°. Then the device moved at the right speed and applied the correct force to break it cleanly in two, again something humans may struggle to replicate after every try. While Heisser and Gridello may have used the precise nature of bots to break spaghetti the same idea of using precise and delicate bots to do complicated or even impossible tasks can be applied elsewhere. I believe with this type of bot technology surgical robots can be a real thing. It just shows to me that bot technology has improved to do things better than humans could ever do.

Works Cited:

Chiu, Allyson "MIT students solve spaghetti-breaking problem that stumped famed physicit" Newsela 31 Aug 2018. Web 17 Sep 2018

<https://newsela.com/read/spaghetti-breaking-experiment/id/45477/>

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