The cheerio effect
If you’re like me, you probably used to play with your cheerios as a means of stalling in the morning before going to school. I used to play with my cheerios and see what sorts of patterns I could make without actually touching them. I used to do the same with bubbles in my juice. I used to try to influence them and then figure out why they were behaving the way they did. Apparently I wasn’t the only one who was fascinated by liquids and the way they interacted with solids because there’s a new study that is due to be published in the American Journal of Physics that explains the physics of cheerios a bowl of milk. I always used to like eating cheerios because they didn’t break down into particulate matter, and I never had to hunt for the last cheerio in a bowl full of milk. Now I know why.
The clumping effect is a result of a combination of surface tension, buoyancy, and gravity. Cheerios float, but they also press down on the surface of the milk, creating little concave indentations in the surface. So when two cheerios float near one another, they “fall down” each other’s cave, creating the appearance of an attractive force.
Cheerios on the edge of a bowl of milk are sitting atop the meniscus of the milk, and when there’s a chain of them along the edge, it’s because they’re atop the meniscus, forming their own little concave indentations making them seem sticky.
From MSNBC.
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