What do you get when you combine the "Wayne Gretzky of knuckle cracking" with a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine? The answer to a very old question, it turns out.
By using MRI to video-record knuckle cracking in action, researchers have discovered that the unsettling "pop" made by cracking one's knuckles results from the rapid creation of a cavity in the fluid inside the joints.
"It's a little bit like forming a vacuum," study researcher Greg Kawchuk, a professor of rehabilitation medicine at the University of Alberta in Canada, said in a statement. "As the joint surfaces suddenly separate, there is no more fluid available to fill the increasing joint volume, so a cavity is created, and that event is what's associated with the sound." Read more...
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