Rough tl;dr: someone saw that pasta packages is inefficient, so they made experimental pastas that are flat when uncooked but get 3D when cooked

Ok, sometimes in specialist magazines you encounter something that needs to be shared immediately; this is the case with the article by Yao and (many of) their colleagues:

1) they noticed an issue that could be summarized as "many landfills in USA are full of plastic bags that still had pasta in them";

2) they analyzed the issue and noticed that several types of pasta are terribly inefficiently packed (penne pasta, for example, actually fill only 33% of the volume necessary to contain them);

3) they considered solving the problem by designing and experimenting with several types of pasta that are flat while raw but that become three dimensional once cooked (see picture).

This is due to the fact that the rifling is present only on one side of the pasta (obviously that is blasphemy to us <note the post is in Italian>), and these, swelling while cooking, create so called Gaussian curvatures.

Ok, the issue could be mitigated just by using more sustainable packaging, but when I see so much brain power applied to such trivial issues, I just get very excited... I can't help it.

Science diagrams that look like shitposts.

Not a diagram, but https://zenodo.org/record/4008297

Hehe