Why won’t spaghetti snap neatly in two?
Fragmentation of rods by cascading cracks: why spaghetti does not break in half
Bend dry spaghetti and it shatters into three or more pieces, never two. Physicists finally worked out why.
Ig Nobel 2006
Richard Feynman reportedly spent an evening breaking spaghetti trying to understand this. When a stick snaps, the broken ends whip back and send a wave through the pasta, which bends it so much it cracks again.
Bonus: in 2018 a different team at MIT found that if you twist the spaghetti while bending it, you can get a clean break in two.
Pasta is chaos in stick form.