just read a delightful article about the physics of Oreos, which gave me a new favorite journal article figure:
(a) What happens when you twist an Oreo? (b) Eventually it splits into two parts, exposing the creme. (c) and (d) We observed that in a typical failure profile for Oreos from newly opened boxes, the creme most often tends to remain on one side, “wafer 1,” with a consistent orientation per box. In this case, wafer 1 faces to the left side of the upright box for a standard size package of regular Oreos. The creme occasionally splits between sides, often due to defects or small fractures in one or both wafers. (e) This is consistent for cookies with different creme levels, with a strong bias toward wafers facing one side of the box rather than the other, facing left for regular, right for double, and up for mega (where rows are oriented vertically rather than horizontally) in standard size packages.
Source: On Oreology, the fracture and flow of “milk's favorite cookie®”
