This is Scientific Americans, 60-Second Science. I'm Karen Huffing.

Doing science isn't easy. It takes an enormous amount of time and energy to collect and

analyze data. At least, that's the way it usually works.

This is one of those examples that we joke that we can snap our fingers and get data.

That's because Saad Balmla and his students just wrapped up a study of the physics of finger

snapping. They found that the right amount of friction is key to a successful snap.

Their work appears in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface.

Balmla's lab at Georgia Tech focuses on ultra-fast motion in nature.

Organisms can achieve really, really fast motions and we're curious about how they're able to do this

and how we may extract those principles for perhaps synthetic systems.

Their science may be hardcore, but their lab meetings include time to be a bit more

playful. We have something called super happy fun time and in this we'll talk about

something typically non-scientific just to kind of diffuse the situation after a typically

intense scientific discussion that a student presents.

A couple years back, their talk turned to the movie Infinity Wars.

In the climax of this Avengers flick, supervillain Thanos forever alters the Marvel Cinematic Universe

snap of his massive metal-clad fingers.

But something about the scene left Balmla scratching his head.

And I said, you know what, I'm willing to make a bet that if you had metallic gauntlets like

Thanos has, I would suspect that it's actually very difficult to store energy in a controllable way.

Energy that then has to get released quickly, if you really want to snap.

So, Raga Vacharya, a student in Fomla's lab, set up an experiment.

...