(Credit: Physical Review Letters/American Physical Society) (Inside Science) -- Most of us are familiar with the screeching noise packing tape makes when it's peeled off a box, as well as the frustration of failing to cleanly remove a label from a new purchase. It turns out that the jerky stop-and-go motion we experience when peeling tape occurs at a microscopic level as well. Scientists exploring the physics of peeling tape have observed that tape detaches from a surface in a series of tiny lines perpendicular to the peeling direction that can travel faster than an F-15 fighter jet. The researchers captured this action using a high-speed camera with microscopic resolution filming at 300,000 frames per second.
The vertical lines in the video are perpendicular to the peeling direction. The average distance between each line is about the width of a single human hair, and each line ripples across the tape ...
