The March of the Metro Gnomes

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Yay for mechanical coupling, which is enough of an effect to drive these into synch as long as they are all naturally oscillating close to the same frequency. This same effect is/was used in clock shops — pendulum clocks hung on a wall would similarly synchronize, giving the illusion that they must all be wonderfully precise clocks, to all be ticking at the same rate and in phase like that.

Spoiler alert: nothing dramatic happens in the last minute of the video — they just tick away. It’s tempting to try a cadence (There she was, just a-walkin’ down the street…), but the ticks are a bit fast.

There's More Than One Way to Crack an Egg

Cracking Eggs 101

[S]cience has finally come up with an explanation for what comes naturally to most home cooks: Eggs crack best around their equators, says MIT mechanical engineer Pedro Reis, because of their geometry. He and a young colleague, Arnaud Lazarus, have just published a paper in Physical Review Letters demonstrating a link between an eggshell’s geometry (it belongs to a class of shapes known as ovoids) and a mechanical property called rigidity—the quality that, along with strength, determines how much force an object can withstand before it cracks.