In fiction, magic makes levitation easy. With a simple swish-and-flick of his wand, Ron Weasley yanks a troll’s club high above its head in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. Through graceful ...

When a delicate object crashes onto the floor, most people expect it to shatter into several pieces. What they might not know, however, is that the sizes of those fragments—whether from a broken plate ...

A new mathematical equation describes the distribution of different fragment sizes when an object breaks. Remarkably, the distribution is the same for everything from bubbles to spaghetti. When you ...