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Physicists solve pebble mystery Jul 19
A question that has been around since the time of Aristotle -- what shape is a pebble? -- has now been solved by physicists in France and the US. Douglas Durian of the University of Pennsylvania and colleagues in Strasbourg say that a pebble is "a nearly round object with a near-Gaussian distribution of curvatures". All pebbles, regardless of their original shape, end up with a similar shape that depends solely on how the pebble was eroded over time. The results could help geologists determine the history of a pebble simply by looking at its geometry (Phys. Rev. Lett. 97 028001).
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