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welcome to the khatky ride home for th, January 28th, 2021. I'm Jackson Bird. The mathematics of knitting, how France is trying to legally protect smells, a cautionary tale that will inspire you to go check on your office building if you've

been working from home and no one's done that for a few months, and a horrifying new product

from Kraft Mac and Cheese. Here are some of the cool things from the news today.

Have you ever thought about the geometry of knitting?

Not the geometry of final knitted products, but of the yarn and stitches themselves.

Now if you're not a knitter, you may not know that there are hundreds, perhaps thousands of different types of stitches that can be used when knitting to create a different look or effect.

Picking the right one or combining a few can help a product lay flat or form into the correct shape or just look cool or present a challenge for the knitter.

Physicist Elizabeth Matsumoto is a lifelong knitter who has been studying the math behind knitting

ever since starting to wonder about it while in grad school at the University of Pennsylvania.

Now she hopes to build a catalog of the mathematical rules that explain the resulting fabric

properties from combining various stitches. Quoting science news,

by varying stitch combinations,

a knitter can alter the elasticity,

mechanical strength, and 3D structure of the resulting fabric.

Yarn on its own isn't very elastic,

but when knitted, the yarn gives rise to fabric that can stretch by more than twice its length

while the yarn itself barely stretches.

...