Modeling the friction between pages in a book

It all started with a shaky washing machine. Pedro Reis, head of the Flexible Structures Laboratory at EPFL's School of Engineering, rolled up a piece of fabric and placed it under the machine to stop it from moving. After he saw how well the rolled-up fabric worked as a vibration damper, he got to thinking. He spoke with Samuel Poincloux, a postdoc at his lab, about his idea and they soon realized that the physics behind a piece of rolled-up material undergoing deformation is actually quite non...