A new experiment reveals, in a nutshell, why the largest particles in some mixtures tend to gather at the top.
This phenomenon is known as the Brazil nut effect, since jostling mixed nut packages tends to bring bulky Brazil nuts to the top. The effect can also be seen in cereal boxes and even space rocks (SN: 8/15/14). Understanding how it works could help manufacturers create more uniform mixtures of ingredients for food processing, or more even distributions of active ingredients in medicine tablets, researchers report April 19 in Scientific Reports.
The Brazil nut effect has been tough to crack because it’s difficult to track how individual objects move
→ Continue reading at Science News