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Open a can of mixed nuts, and chances are you'll find a bunch of Brazil nuts topping the heap—whether that's a good or bad thing depends on how you feel about Brazil nuts. It's such a common phenomenon that it's known as the "Brazil nut effect" (though muesli mix also gives rise to the same dynamics of granular convection). Now, on video for the first time, a team of scientists from the University of Manchester in England has captured the complicated dynamics that cause the Brazil nut effect, according to a new paper published in the journal Scientific Reports.

From a physics standpoint, those mixed nuts are an example of a granular material, like a sand pile. As I wrote at Gizmodo back in 2016, the primary mechanisms behind the Brazil nut effect are percolation and convection. Percolation causes smaller grains to move through larger grains to the bottom of the pile, while convection pushes the larger grains toward the top. Complicating matters is gravity, pulling down on every grain, as well as the fact that every individual grain is jostling against all the others in the container, producing friction and mechanical energy (lost as heat).

Enlarge / A prototype SX Core device soldered to a Nintendo Switch motherboard. (credit: Team Xeceuter)

Months after his arrest on 11 felony counts last year, Nintendo has filed a civil lawsuit against Gary "GaryOPA" Bowser, the leader of notorious Switch hacking group Team Xecuter, in a Seattle federal court.

The suit (as obtained by Polygon) seeks significant monetary damages and disgorgement of all profits from Team Xecuter's sale of the piracy-enabling SX OS software and a line of hardware devices that use various exploits to install the OS on Switch units. The suit alleges that "at one point, the SX OS was pre-installed on 89% of modded/hacked Nintendo Switch products available for sale," though the suit doesn't provide a source for that number.

The lawsuit calls out Bowser as "one of only a handful of key members of Team Xecuter," and it quotes Ars' own assessment (without credit) that Bowser is "the closest thing to a public face for the team of coders and foreign manufacturers that made up the [Team Xecuter] supply chain." In promoting and selling SX OS, Bowser "worked with a network of developers; established a distribution chain of resellers, testers, and websites; and designed the marketing and content of other public-facing websites for Team Xecuter," the suit alleges.