RANDOM SAMPLES

摘要

One grows in caves over thousands of years; the other appears in the back of your fridge in a mater of hours. But new research suggests that for all their differences, the mathematics describing stalactites and icicles is the same. According to work presented last week at a meeting on natural complexity at the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge, U.K., the rate of growth of either a stalactite or an icicle can be modeled by a simple power law based on the radius and the inclination of the surface at any given point.