I'm always amazed at how wasteful such experiments appear from the outside. You have two well educated people building a fancy machine to
break spaghetti into two pieces instead of three. Pause and take a moment to reflect on how silly and wasteful that sounds. I'm thankful for the brief section on "What possible application could this have?" although wish it went a little more in depth in how it could help build carbon nanotubes or
how it might help future engineering projects. I can appreciate that this research
likely has greater merit than "answering a silly question".
The paper is in the article - but for those more interested in the research paper: http://www.lmm.jussieu.fr/spaghetti/audoly_neukirch_fragment...