Shake Cereal Boxes Side To Side For More Even Distribution

One of the mysteries in life is why, when opening a box of cereal, the biggest pieces are all at the top, while the tinier bits are stuck at the bottom. Mental Floss explains this “Muesli Effect” phenomenon and how a simple box shake can fix it.

Picture: jonolist/Flickr

The Muesli Effect is:

the tendency of different size particles to separate, with the largest paradoxically ending up on top and the smallest down below. It also occurs in bags of mixed nuts, which explains why Brazil nuts are always on top (thus the alternate nickname, the “Brazil Nut Effect”), and in gardens, which is why no matter how many rocks you remove from the soil, there are always more next spring, rising up from the Earth’s depths.

Engineers found that the way containers are shaken when they’re packaged — vertically, parallel to gravity — could cause the large particles to rise to the top.

So, if you like your mixed flakes, grains, nuts, fruit and whatever else is in your cereal box to stay mixed, the quick fix is to shake the container horizontally — the box held upright and shaken side to side. This makes the larger pieces shift down and is more effective than turning the box upside down.

After that, dump some of the cereal in a colander to separate the cereal dust from the cereal.

Find more scientific solutions to first world problems at the link below.

7 Scientific Solutions for Annoying Little Problems [Mental Floss]