While working on his doctoral thesis at Harvard University over the last few years, Omer Gottesman spent a lot of time at his desk crumpling sheets of paper, especially when he was stuck. He would ...

Crumpling is a ubiquitous, though poorly understood, physical phenomenon. It occurs when a fender absorbs the energy of a car crash, when Earth’s crust buckles at the interface between colliding ...

University physicists Thomas Witten and Sidney Nagel have been investigating where energy is stored in thin sheets of Mylar when work is performed on them by crumpling. They find the ability of a ...

From studies of “geometric frustration,” scientists learn how paper folds under pressure. By Siobhan Roberts A piece of crumpled paper, in all of its creased fragmentations, suffers from “geometric ...

Thin elastic sheets are important materials across length scales ranging from mesoscopic (polymerized membranes, clay platelets, virus capsids) to macroscopic (paper, metal foils). The crumpling of ...

While working on his doctoral thesis at Harvard University over the last few years, Omer Gottesman spent a lot of time at his desk crumpling sheets of paper, especially when he was stuck. He would ...