Granular material asteroids. Some examples of granular materials are snow, nuts, coal, sand, rice, coffee, corn flakes, fertilizer, and bearing balls. Research into granular materials is thus directly applicable and goes back at least to Charles-Augustin de Coulomb, whose law of friction was originally stated for granular materials. Granular materials are commercially important in applications as diverse as pharmaceutical industry, agriculture, and energy production. Powders are a special class of granular material due to their small particle size, which makes them more cohesive and more easily suspended in a gas. The soldier/physicist Brigadier Ralph Alger Bagnold was an early pioneer of the
Silt, Colorado west. U.S. Route 6 is Main Street in Silt, and provides a local route parallel to I-70. According to the United States Census Bureau, the town has a total area of , of which , or 1.46%, is water. This climatic region is typified by large seasonal temperature differences, with warm to hot (and often humid) summers and cold (sometimes severely cold) winters. According to the Köppen Climate Classification system, Silt has a humid continental climate, abbreviated "Dfb" on climate maps. As of the census of 2000, there were 1,740 people, 648 households, and 452 families residing in the town.