Swans on Tea

We already know that cornstarch and water mix to make a non-newtonian fluid. Here’s what can happen when you stress and relax it rapidly (where rapidly is 80 Hz)
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Balancing forces, page 1
Balancing forces, page 2

“Instant ice” from a supersaturated solution.
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Will it Go ‘Round in Circles?
Building The Amazing Steam Candle
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This is a variant of the pop-pop engine — if you point the tubes parallel rater than in opposite directions, you’ll get linear propulsion.
At first glance you might think this couldn’t work. Once you [...]

Molecular Plasma is Cooler Than You Think
Plasma inside the sun blazes at millions of degrees, but much of the matter between the stars is also plasma, in a colder form. In the lab, cold plasmas have always been made from ionized atoms, but a team reports in the 14 November Physical Review Letters that molecules [...]

How to make water bounce.
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Using a high-speed camera setup in the lab, GE scientists captured details of water droplets dancing on amazing superhydrophobic surfaces developed in GE Global Research’s Nanotechnology lab.

As in Focused Ion Beam
Cold Atoms Could Replace Hot Gallium In Focused Ion Beams
Because of the versatility of their approach—it can be used with a wide range of ions tailored to the task at hand—it is expected to have broad application in nanotechnology both for carving smaller features on semiconductors than now are possible and [...]

Schrödinger’s Drum
The researchers showed that with current technology, experimentalists should be able to cool a pair of such membranes to a state in which they act like a two-atom molecule, or to an entangled state–a quantum condition in which measurements on one instantly generate effects on the other.

Light My Photonic Crystal
[R]esearchers describe a method for adding light-emitting elements in a precise way to a future photonic circuit. They filled a small hole in a silicon wafer with a liquid containing tiny chunks of fluorescent semiconductor and imaged the pattern of light that was generated. The technique permits easy removal and replacement of [...]

Exploring Liquids: An Experiment
Fun, and physics, with fluids
Here’s a fun experiment you can try using the contents of your kitchen cupboard. Explore the effects of different densities and learn about refraction, viscosity and the planet Jupiter. You’ll need five different liquids; I used golden syrup, dishwashing liquid, water, alcohol and vegetable oil. I also used [...]

I’ve been seemingly running in quicksand ever since returning from the 7th Symposium on Frequency Standards and Metrology, what with the pileup of work while I was away (and everything seemingly breaking during that period of time) and getting ready for our clocks to leave the nest. But now, as I’m burning up my [...]

More atomic force microscope writing. (Like spelling out ‘IBM’)
‘Atomic pen’ writes with individual atoms
An Osaka University research team has demonstrated an “atomic pen” that can inscribe nano-sized text on metal by manipulating individual atoms on the surface.
According to the researchers, whose results appear in the October 17 edition of Science magazine, the atomic pen [...]