If you take more than 10 percent of the fruit in a stacked produce display — watch out.
Fruit display collapses are a good system for studying the dynamics that produce avalanches and landslides because they’re relatively simple, says physicist Eduardo Rojas of the University of Antofagasta in Chile (SN: 1/4/16). All the objects are arranged in a nonrandom, crystallike form and are roughly the same size and shape — unlike the earth of a mountainside, for instance. This makes it easier to examine the impact of removing one object on the overall structure.
Using computer simulations, Rojas and colleagues modeled fruit stacked at many different angles to identify when a collapse would never happen and when one would happen instantly. In between those extremes, the team simulated what would happen to the integrity of the display when more and more fruit was removed.
About 10 percent of the fruit in a given display can be removed before triggering an avalanche, the simulations suggest. If 29 shoppers grabbed an apple from a stack of 300, the next shopper might want to put on a hard hat before plucking one for themselves.
2024-01-04 07:00:00
Source from www.sciencenews.org
rnrn