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| Home > Science Fair Project Guide > |
How Stuff Breaks!
| Sometimes we want things to break . . . |
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Breaking is not always a bad thing. With soda cans, for example, we want the rim around the opening to break before anything else. Have you ever had the pull tab break off before the can opens? Don't you hate it when that happens? Think of two different explanations for this kind of soda can failure.
| Sometimes we don't! |
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For obvious reasons, we want bridges to be strong and hold up to a many different environmental conditions.
For more information on the Tacoma Narrows Bridge disaster, these online references are a good place to start:
- Ketchum, M., 2000. "Mark Ketchum's Bridge Collapse Page," [accessed February 16, 2006] http://www.ketchum.org/bridgecollapse.html.
- Doole, S. and A. Champneys, date unknown. "Tacoma Narrows Bridge Disaster," Bristol Centre for Applied Nonlinear Mathematics, University of Bristol [accessed February 16, 2006] http://www.enm.bris.ac.uk/research/nonlinear/tacoma/tacoma.html.
