Breakfast maths 🥣😋

Why are the large nuts always at the top of the cereal packet and not mixed in?! 😩🥄or even at the bottom?!🤔 It can be super annoying when you want a breakfast of properly mixed cereal and get a bowl full of one ingredient. It also seems very strange that the larger things are at the top and haven’t sunk to the bottom🤨. But anyway, this can be solved by just shaking the box right?! ❌ Well actually the shaking of the cereal box on its travels into your food cupboard is probably what has caused this annoyance in the first place! When the cereal shakes, the larger nuts move and jump around forming gaps underneath them and the smaller muesli grains drop into these spaces. This means that the nuts eventually rise to the top of the pack and the muesli grains fall to the bottom. We call this the Brazil nut effect 🥜. Cereals are granular materials (this means they are made up of grains!) and the Brazil nut effect can be seen with other granular materials too. Other examples of granular materials are sand, sugar, dessert sprinkles, coffee grains and snow. These materials have unusual properties – while one grain of sand is clearly a solid material, a group of loads of grains of sand can flow like a liquid through your fingers! If the change from being solid like to liquid like happens when you don’t want it to however, then it could cause big problems – like avalanches! 🗻😨 Once again maths comes to the rescue 🎉. Maths can be used to find safe ways of handling these granular materials by modelling how forces pass through each grain and the changes in flow when there are objects in the way. This maths has been used in the design of avalanche barriers to protect people.😊 ⭐️Try at Home activity🙌🏻: Add sugar and dessert sprinkles to a container and try to mix these together through shaking the container in different ways. What happens?!👀 #appliedmathematics #physics #everydaymath #mathsinlife #stem #scienceeducation #didyouknow #materials #avalanche #sand #granularmaterials #womeninstem #breakfastmaths #scicomm