Physicists figured out the ideal container size for pistachio shells

Shelling your favourite snack nuts just got a lot easier: physicists have worked out the exact size of bowl to best fit discarded pistachio shells.

Ruben Zakine and Michael Benzaquen at École Polytechnique in Paris often find themselves discussing science in the cafeteria while eating pistachios. Naturally, they began wondering about the mathematics behind storing their snack refuse.

The researchers stuffed 613 pistachios into a cylindrical container to determine “packing density”, or the fraction of space taken up by whole nuts…