Oreos are the absolute best cookie for people who like fidgeting with their food. You can dunk them in milk, which creates that delightful melt-away t

Oreos Baffle Researchers, Challenge the Laws of Physics

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2023-03-26 18:30:03

Oreos are the absolute best cookie for people who like fidgeting with their food. You can dunk them in milk, which creates that delightful melt-away texture when you eat them. Or you can twist the cookie open so as to savor each creme-topped half in turn. Both are great options, but it’s the latter approach that has scientists baffled.

When you twist open an Oreo, you’ve probably noticed that the creme mostly stays with one side of the sandwich cookie, leaving you with a plain chocolate wafer in one hand. Crystal Owens, a Ph.D. candidate in MIT’s mechanical engineering department, looked into exactly why this happens, and the Wall Street Journal reports that there’s much more to this cookie-twisting phenomenon than you might think.

As part of her study, Owens employed the use of a rheometer, an instrument with two counter-rotating metal plates, to measure how Oreo creme would react to twisting forces, aka torsion. After using the rheometer to twist open more than 1,000 Oreos, Owens’ research team found that the creme inexplicably stuck to one side about 80% of the time.

Curiously, other materials, such as ice cream and toothpaste, would split evenly down the middle when torsion was applied. In the case of Oreos, the speed of the twisting didn’t seem to influence the outcome; at the slowest speed, which takes about five whole minutes to complete, the creme still stuck to one side. When the rheometer was run at max speed, which is over 100 times the speed a human can manually twist an Oreo, the creme just flew off the cookie entirely.

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