Fine Structure

Feynman mused that spaghetti mysteriously breaks into three (or more) pieces when bent until breaking, rather than the two pieces you would expect. As far as his written works are concerned, he never did come up with a proper theory for why spaghetti breaks the way it does.

And for good reason, it's quite unintuitive: apparently breaking a strand of spaghetti doesn't release all the tension as you think it would. And the extra tension goes on to break the strand in another location, always leaving you with at least three pieces.

io9, despite being labeled as a comic/scifi cul-de-sac, turns out a lot more science content than you would expect. Gems like this occur weekly, if not more.