Browse Physics

Oil droplets zip around the bottom of a petri dish powered by their attraction to surfactant molecules and can cover the same ground many times.

Colorful soap films confirm an old theory on mixing in a turbulent fluid.

Researchers have measured the energy required for two membranes to fuse–the process that occurs when a virus attacks a cell.

Computer simulations and experiments show that a ball can rebound from a surface with more vertical speed than it had initially.

After decades of searching, researchers identified a new type of liquid crystal where the molecules align in two dimensions, rather than one.

Forcing water drops through a T-shaped intersection of tubes breaks them into droplets of reproducible size.

Researchers study lunar crater formation by dropping balls into sand.

Water can play a dual role in granular mixtures, encouraging mixing in some situations but discouraging it in others.

A new theory predicts the structure of wrinkles in thin sheets of any material and may offer ways of eliminating them.

A new technique generates miniature dunes in a water tank and appears to verify fundamental principles of dune formation.

Experiments on the response of crumpled sheets to a squeezing force help explain their extraordinary strength.

Sand flowing down a rough slope forms eddies–the first example of spontaneous vortices in a granular material.

A new material stretches and contracts in response to light.

A comparison of foams made with two different gases supports a theory on how foam changes over time.

A new technique measures the mechanical properties of cell membranes by watching the motion of small beads attached to 20-micrometer-diameter bubbles of membrane surrounded by a layer of protein.

In the first quantitative study of the jamming of grain hoppers, a team derived a mathematical model that could lead to improved hopper designs.

Two negatively charged beads near a wall in water can attract one another. This surprising result may in some cases be explained by the fluid flow created as they are repelled by the wall.

The puzzling properties of toothpaste-like materials make sense, based on new experiments showing that pastes have much in common with glasses–disordered materials that physicists have been studying for many years.

A set of violently shaken beads exhibits a velocity distribution similar to that of an ideal gas, regardless of the shaking speed, suggesting that a fundamental theory of granular materials may be possible.

A drop of soapy molecules and water can form a rigid gel crystal that displays more facets than any crystal ever observed–a phenomenon called ‘the Devil’s staircase.’