University physicists Thomas Witten and Sidney Nagel have been investigating where energy is stored in thin sheets of Mylar when work is performed on them by crumpling. They find the ability of a ...

Crumpling is a ubiquitous, though poorly understood, physical phenomenon. It occurs when a fender absorbs the energy of a car crash, when Earth’s crust buckles at the interface between colliding ...

From studies of “geometric frustration,” scientists learn how paper folds under pressure. By Siobhan Roberts A piece of crumpled paper, in all of its creased fragmentations, suffers from “geometric ...

Despite the apparent ease with which sheets of paper are crumpled and tossed away, crumpling dynamics are often considered a paradigm of complexity. This arises from the infinite number of ...