ENGINEERING brings great benefit to humanity, from aircraft to bicycles and from bridges to computer chips. It has, though, had difficulty creating a shoelace that does not accidentally come loose. At least in part, this is because, no one has truly understood why shoelaces come undone in the first place. But that crucial gap in human knowledge has just been plugged. As they report in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, Christopher Daily-Diamond, Christine Gregg and Oliver O'Reilly, a group of engineers at the University of California, Berkeley, have now worked out the mechanics of shoelace-bow disintegration.
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