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 ...

While working on his doctoral thesis at Harvard University over the last few years, Omer Gottesman spent a lot of time at his desk crumpling sheets of paper, especially when he was stuck. He would ...

Crumpled paper is unusually weight-resistant. Its patterns are entirely unpredictable. Even with the same sheet, they’re impossible to replicate. See why. It’s mind-bending but true: the average ball ...

We now turn to examine the focusing profile of the entire sheet. In Fig. 3b we show the bending-energy-density profiles for an entire sheet in different compaction ratios. The power-law regime of the ...

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 ...