Physics Buzz

For five jam-packed days, physicists from around the world gathered in San Antonio, Texas to share their research with colleagues. The American Physical Society's annual March Meeting featured over 8,600 presentations and posters, and brought together more than 10,000 physicists and physics students. Most of the talks were highly technical, and of interest only to people deeply involved in their respective subjects. But others were appealing to people beyond the physics community. Here are a few stories about the March Meeting talks that you might spot in recent news outlets.

Add “in space” to the end of any sentence and you create a completely different picture full of possibilities. For example, “drinking a glass of water” in space does not require the glass since you can simply suck a floating water blob out of the air. Astronaut and chemical engineer Don Pettit has conducted a number of engaging experiments in space during his off-duty time aboard the International Space Station, which the American Physical Society has captured in our 14-video series Science off the Sphere . Fans of Science off the Sphere are in luck. Today, APS released a bonus clip that includes never-before-shown footage of some of Pettit’s experiments, which show what everyday-life activities are like in space. From toying with a yo-yo to watching water dance to the bass vibrations of ZZ top tunes, Pettit offers an entertaining look at his spacey science hobbies that capture and inspire the imagination.

The American Physical Society's annual Division of Fluid Dynamics Meeting is well underway in Pittsburgh this week, and it's showcasing a slew of gorgeous videos contending for prizes in the Gallery of Fluid Motion. We've featured a few of these videos in the past few weeks, and we've got another beautiful example today. Today's video covers the spontaneous motion of dyed liquid droplets as they interact with one another. Surface tension causes the droplets to dance, kiss, and stride along flat glass surfaces. In the video, researchers Nate J Cira and Manu Prakash (Stanford) show off just what surface tension can do: it can sort different liquids automatically, cause droplets to chase one another in a circle, and much more. Check it out!

( Clip of a fruit fly cleaning itself slowed by 33x. Credit: Guillermo Amador at Georgia Institute of Technology.) From a distance, insects can appear smooth and sleek, but get close enough and hundreds of tiny bristles called setae come into focus. Suddenly what once seemed smooth now resembles a porcupine terror. For certain insect species, setae cover many parts of the body including the legs and eyes. The tiny hairs contain nerves that signal to the insect when dust, pollen, mold or other particles are on its body. Moreover, insects use setae as combs to clean themselves by rubbing the bristles against each other, which flicks debris away. These are just two examples of the many applications setae serve insects and there are still more to be discovered. A team of scientists at Georgia Institute of Technology recently found another application of setae on the eyes of fruit flies.

Fluid dynamics often produces some of the most beautiful, albeit under-appreciated, physics images and videos. To celebrate this field's striking images, the American Physical Society's Division of Fluid Dynamics holds a contest every year for related posters and videos that best display "artistic value, scientific content, and originality." One promising entry this year features a high-speed capture of fluid jets juggling ping pong balls. It's a gorgeous video, and you can watch it below. As researchers Roberto Zenit and Enrique Soto (National Autonomous University of Mexico) explain in the video, streams of water can suspend the balls due to a Bernoulli-like effect similar to the one responsible for lift in an aircraft. To levitate the ball for long periods of time, the researchers needed two things: a balance of vertical forces (we'll call this levitation ) and horizontal forces (we'll call this stability ).