Why boiling droplets can race across hot oily surfaces

When you're frying something in a skillet and some droplets of water fall into the pan, you may have noticed those droplets skittering around on top of the film of hot oil. Now, that seemingly trivial phenomenon has been ...

Sound waves spin droplets to concentrate, separate nanoparticles

Mechanical engineers at Duke University have devised a method for spinning individual droplets of liquid to concentrate and separate nanoparticles for biomedical purposes. The technique is much more efficient than traditional ...

Social bacteria build shelters using the physics of fingerprints

Forest-dwelling bacteria known for forming slimy swarms that prey on other microbes can also cooperate to construct mushroom-like survival shelters known as fruiting bodies when food is scarce. Now a team at Princeton University ...

Predicting delayed instabilities in viscoelastic solids

It is presently challenging to determine the stability of viscoelastic structures since seemingly stable conformations may gradually creep (plastic deformation of a material under stress as a function of time) until their ...

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