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
Fern House Gravel Pit no public access. Fern House Gravel Pit Fern House Gravel Pit is a 1.3 hectare geological Site of Special Scientific Interest in Fern, near Bourne End in Buckinghamshire. It is also a Geological Conservation Review site. This site exposes the Pleistocene Taplow Gravel formation, and may help to elucidate a poorly understood period in the history of the River Thames, between glacial Anglian stage, around 450,000 years ago, when the river was diverted south to its present course, and the warm Ipswichian around 120,000 years ago. Fossils found at the site include straight-tusked elephants and mammoths. The site is on