Perfect Spheres to Test Einstein

Einstein is looking at you through a near perfect glass sphere. In fact this is the most precise sphere that humans have ever created. The surface of this little marble is so smooth that any bumps or scratches are no higher than 40 atoms. Cool! But why?

Free Floating Plasma Orb or Squid Ghost

Ghost of discharged capacitor found haunting a glass of water! What could be more scary than that? Try a hot ball of electric plasma.

Laser-Plasma Creates Electro-Optic Shocks

High power laser pulses create shockwaves and bubbles in plasma.

Red Dye Crowned in Milk

This crown is formed by the splash and droplets of a 2 mm drop of red dye impacting on a thin layer of milk.

Centrifugal Instability of an Oscillating Boundary Layer

A cylinder twisting back and forth in water, produces a "centrifugal instability," as shown by fluorescent dye. This fluid pattern will not only help scientists better understand ocean dynamics, but it is also aesthetically beautiful.

Magnetic Properties of Thin Films

This spectroscopic image shows what are called microwave-frequency magnetic resonances of an array of parallel, metallic thin film nanowire "stripes". The peak in the center reflects resonances occurring at the stripe edges.  The strong horizontal bar of violet, black, and white, is due to resonances in the body of the stripes.

Micro-origami

When you dry your hands after washing them they don’t typically warp and wrinkle. That’s not the same with paper.

MHDPD-Magneto Hydro Dynamic Propulsion Device: The Experiment/ The Attenuation

Red and green dye reveals the turbulent fluid flows from the magneto hydro dynamic propulsion device.

Cornstarch Dimples

A vibrating cornstarch solution appears to come alive and grow fingers. A dimple in the fluid created by a burst of air expands into a deep hole.

Bouncing Jets

Oil is slick but did you know it can also bounce?

Cracking Up

If you dropped a wineglass, you'd expect it to shatter, not skitter across the floor like a silver goblet would.

Steady Drip of Progress

It flows in rivulets, puddles in depressions, falls from the sky; you can even buy it at Costco--three-dimensional, "bulk" water is everywhere.

Smashing Ions

Brookhaven National Laboratory's new Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) smashes two high-energy beams of gold nuclei together head-on, in an attempt to create a state of matter, called quark-gluon plasma, that last existed only ten millionths of a second after the Big Bang.

Crystal Clear

When an all-electron Wigner crystal (top) is squeezed too tightly, the electron wave functions begin to overlap (middle), and then create a quantum liquid (bottom).

Radioactive Hotdog?

A spark flying between a metal doorknob and your hand is an intricate chain of electrical events.

Tiny Tubes

Entangled pairs of particles, in which measuring the state of one simultaneously determines the state of the other, are a central part of proposed schemes for quantum cryptography and teleportation.

Polymers to Polyhedrons

Nanoparticles covered in stringy polymers might someday form the building blocks for drug delivery systems or disease assays.

A New Twist

The frictionless flow of atoms within solid helium may be confined to the axis of a screw dislocation, a spiral defect like the one in this crystal of silicon carbide.

Nanotube Nests

Researchers have assembled carbon nanotubes into arrays of loops, lassos, and hooks.

Mesoscopic Mystery

Researchers continue to push rival interpretations of a vexing problem in mesoscopic physics, the size scale where quantum and classical worlds co-exist.

The Little Chill

Some lasers can burn through solids, but others, shined on the right materials, have a chilling effect.

In Synch

Electrons don't normally know one direction from another, so researchers were perplexed a few years ago when they found a cold plane of electrons suddenly choosing to conduct many times better in one direction than in the perpendicular one.

Underwater Desert

Windblown dunes can engulf houses, roads, and airfields, but researchers have had a hard time studying them under controlled conditions.

Veins of Gold

Researchers dream of building crystals from the ground up to achieve tight control of their periodic structure.

Flapping Flags

The symbolic beauty of a flag flying high in the wind is simple to understand.

Fire!

From bonfires to match sticks, flames usually have simple, predictable shapes.

Plasma Jets

From the surface of the sun to the violent cores of quasars, many astrophysical objects shoot plasma in sharply defined streams, guided by magnetic fields.

Ingenious Algae

Many of the oceans' algae have evolved natural "sunscreens" as protection from the sun's ultraviolet rays

Dripping Faucets

When the faucet drips, most people call the plumber or get out their tools, but some physicists are content to study the phenomenon instead.

Crystal Cannibals

The crystallization process that turns a liquid to a solid is brutally competitive, according to an analysis of experiments performed on the Space Shuttle.

Cold Atoms

This year's physics Nobel Prize went to three researchers who were the first to observe and study the Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC), a new phase of matter.

Crystal Clean

The chemical reactions that keep sulfur and other pollutants from leaving automobile tailpipes rely on catalysts in the form of microscopic particles dispersed within the large surface area of a porous material.

'Hole' Fiber Fights Cancer

A holey fiber may be able to plug the "holes" in the list of laser colors affordable to most scientists.

Catch a Quasiperiodic Wave

Quasicrystals are unusual metallic alloys whose atoms are arranged in orderly patterns that are not quite crystalline.

All Mixed Up

If you fill a barrel part-way with red beads, add some green beads, and then roll it around the room a bit, will your beads blend?