Tying the strongest fishing knot isn’t only about the knot itself. The line you choose matters every bit as much, and thanks to remarkably advancements in the recent decades, you have choices when it ...

Knotted threads secure buttons to shirts. Knots in ropes attach boats to piers. You can find knots in shoestrings, ties, ribbons, and bows. But even without Boy Scouts or sailors, knots would be ...

MIT researchers develop a mathematical model to predict a knot’s stability with the help of color-changing fibers. Photo by Joseph Sandt Knots are some of the oldest and most-used technologies that ...

This story originally appeared on Massive Science, an editorial partner site that publishes science stories by scientists. Subscribe to their newsletter to get even more science sent straight to you.

One sunny day last summer, Mathias Kolle, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, took a couple of eminent colleagues out sailing. They talked about their research. They had some ...

Consider the plight of a gardener struggling with a recalcitrant tangle of garden hose. Sometimes, no amount of pulling or twisting unsnarls the coils. At other times, the tangles readily come apart, ...

Q I am new to wearing ties. I know there are different kinds of tie knots (I see knotting directions for three), but I don't know if any are more right with certain clothes than with others. A You are ...

Color-changing fibers are helping scientists to understand, for the first time, the exact ways some knots hold tighter than others. In 2018, researchers developed pressure-sensitive fibers in part to ...

We are deeply intuitively familiar with our everyday physical world, so it was perhaps a bit of a surprise when researchers discovered a blind spot in our intuitive physical reasoning: it seems humans ...