In the Wall Street Journal Aylin Woodward reports on a study at MIT to determine the best way to twist an Oreo:
“I’ve always been annoyed that I have to twist them apart and then push creme from one side onto the other,†said Crystal Owens, a Ph.D. candidate in MIT’s mechanical engineering department.
She led a group of researchers on a quest to figure out if there was a trick to getting the creme to glom onto both halves.
Usually, Ms. Owens studies materials that could be used as ink for 3-D printing, squishing them between two counter-rotating metal plates in a device known as a rheometer to study how the fluids deform and respond to torsion, or twisting forces.
She and her colleagues determined that the creme stays on one half or the other 80% of the time. Speed, direction, or technique don’t seem to make a difference. Their hypothesis is that the creamy center is stronger than it is sticky. Nabisco expressed delight in the study, favoring “data-informed creativity”.
No report on what happened to the cookies that were used in testing. By my count 28 family-sized bags of Oreos were used.
“Their hypothesis is that the creamy center is stronger than it is sticky.”
The creamy center will have a shear strength higher than dissimilar materials compromised by the crack plane between them.