Physicists work out exactly when a fruit display will fall down

How many oranges can you remove from an angled fruit display before they all tumble down in a fruit avalanche? For 2370 of them, at an angle of 20 degrees with respect to the horizontal, the answer is 190 oranges.

This is one of the results of a series of simulations to work out under what conditions a fruit display will come tumbling down, run by Pablo Gutierrez at O’Higgins University in Chile and his team. “I hear colleagues talk about avalanches in geophysics a…