So what's up with that?

As the latest episode of "Smarter Every Day" explains, this physics mystery has puzzled even the greatest of scientists. A piece of spaghetti will almost always break into more than two pieces, and those breaks seem to occur at exactly the same moment.

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To show us what's going on with our 'sgetti, host Destin decided to film the breakage in slow motion. And then in slower motion. And then, at 250,000 frames per second, in the slowest motion of all pasta-time.

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It turns out that the curvature of the spaghetti is to blame.

When you apply force to a piece of spaghetti, it bends -- then it breaks. Now free from the force that caused it to bend, it begins to straighten out. But on the opposite end of the spaghetti, that tension is being released more slowly. At some point (in much less than a second, in fact) the straightening spaghetti catches up to the still-curved spaghetti, which causes a second break. Or a third and fourth break, if your kitchen floor is lucky.

The newly broken piece will continue on the same path of movement that caused the fracture, which is how you get those frantically spinning broken pieces of spaghetti.