The acoustic emission from breaking a bamboo chopstick or a bundle of spaghetti is found to exhibit similar behavior as the famous seismic laws of Gutenberg-Richter, Omori, and Bath. By use of a force-sensing detector, Prof Hong establish a positive correlation between the statistics of sound intensity and the magnitude of tremor. They also manage to derive these laws analytically without invoking the concept of phase transition, self-organized criticality, or fractal. Their model is deterministic and relies on the existence of a structured cross section, either fibrous or layered. This success at explaining the power-law behavior supports the proposal that geometry is sometimes more important than mechanics. Their work has been featured in pop-science websites soon after uploading to the ArXive, for instance, click 
http://thedailyorbit.com/researchers-snap-chopsticks-and-spaghetti-to-model-earthquake- 
fractures-102815/ 
Prof. Hong is a professor in Department of Physics, National Tsing Hua University and is a visiting researcher of NCTS.