The Cheerios Effect

Ever notice how cereal clumps up in your bowl, or how cereal sticks to the edges of the bowl? Bubbles in beverages do the same thing.You’ve probably seen this surface tension and buoyancy at work, but did you know there’s some mind-blowing science behind it? What we learn in our cereal bowl even connects to the lives of tiny insects that walk on water.

SOURCES/EXTRAS: Vella, Dominic, and L. Mahadevan. “The “cheerios effect”.”American journal of physics 73.9 (2005): 817-825. Gao, Xuefeng, and Lei Jiang. “Biophysics: water-repellent legs of water striders.”

Nature 432.7013 (2004): 36-36. Bush, John WM, and David L. Hu. “Walking on water: biolocomotion at the interface.” Annu. Rev. Fluid Mech. 38 (2006): 339-369. John Bush: Interfacial Locomotion http://math.mit.edu/~bush/?p=998

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