[math-fun] The Brazil-nut effect

...and its application to asteroids (I wonder if this effect is also evident here in seismic California, where I see lots of big boulders.) http://arxiv.org/abs/1407.2748 Out of the handful of asteroids that have been imaged, some have distributions of blocks that are not easily explained. In this paper, we investigate the possibility that seismic shaking leads to the *** size sorting *** of particles in asteroids. In particular, we focus on the so-called Brazil Nut Effect (BNE) that separates large particles from small ones under vibrations.