Wrinkles - on our clothes or skin - are ubiquitous in life, but perplexingly complicated in science. A new study of the physics of wrinkles helps iron out some of the uncertainty.

In particular, scientists have wondered how a wrinkly surface adapts when it meets up with a flat surface. To test this, a team of physicists placed a thin, wrinkly film of common plastic (polystyrene) on a flat surface of water, and watched how the wrinkles finally smoothed out.

"We realized something about how wrinkles end - you have an array of wrinkles, and they stop at some point - and the question is, how do wrinkles fade away at the edge, such as the top of a curtain, or the edge of a sheet?" said researcher Narayanan Menon, a physicist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Smoothing Out Wrinkles

In the experiments, the physicists compressed the plastic sheet in one direction to create the wrinkles in the first place.