"Oobleck" still holds some surprises

The non-Newtonian fluid behavior is fascinating from a physics standpoint, but I'm more interested in why we've largely abandoned teaching this kind of hands-on experimentation in schools when it's such an effective way to make kids actually understand material science.

Watched my kid play with this stuff for like twenty minutes while I was trying to get work done, seemed pretty straightforward to me but I guess engineers need something to do.

So they're just now figuring out that how fast you hit it matters? Pretty sure every kid who's ever made this knows that already.

Curious what the practical applications are here, because right now this seems like the kind of material that's endlessly entertaining in a kitchen but doesn't actually do anything we need it to do.

so they're basically saying punch it and it becomes rock solid but let it ooze and it's basically water, which is exactly what my kitchen table discovered last week when my kid "experimented"

honestly if scientists are still finding new stuff about cornstarch and water that's either really cool or we've completely wasted the last 50 years

That's actually pretty cool, we used to make this stuff in school and it was wild how it acted like both a liquid and solid at the same time!! Science is awesome when they actually dig into how things really work.

my son's been making this stuff for like 3 months straight, I had no idea it was actually interesting enough for scientists to study lol