We are deeply intuitively familiar with our everyday physical world, so it was perhaps a bit of a surprise when researchers discovered a blind spot in our intuitive physical reasoning: it seems humans ...

We tie our shoes, we put on neckties, we wrestle with power cords. Yet despite deep familiarity with knots, most people cannot tell a weak knot from a strong one by looking at them, Johns Hopkins ...

Mathematicians and engineers from MIT have used color-changing fibers to help develop a mathematical model that can predict the stability of a knot. By combining the theoretical with the empirical, ...

It’s time for some more notes on knots. Some will recall that I periodically spend absurd amounts of time testing fishing knots on some lab equipment and then publish the results, usually in our print ...

Researchers have unearthed a robust physics-based mechanism that dictates the sliding strength, or resistance to slippage, of the most common type of surgical knot. In particular, they have found that ...

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The researchers showed participants four knots that are physically similar but have a hierarchy of strength. People were asked to look at the knots, two at a time, and point to the strongest one. The ...