Chemical engineers at The University of Texas at Austin have discovered a new way to control the motion of fluid particles through tiny channels, potentially aiding the development of micro- and nano-scale technologies such as drug delivery devices, chemical and biological sensors, and components for miniaturized biological "lab-on-a-chip" applications.

Chemical engineers at Purdue University are the first to mathematically describe precisely how droplets form when liquids are exposed to electric fields, an advance that could have applications in areas ranging from manufacturing to medical diagnostics.

Physicists at the University of Alberta, in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, have made a major advance in the understanding of what appears to be a new state of matter.

In scientific research, there is great satisfaction when theoretical work is eventually supported by experimentation. Such was the case this week for a team of Italian and US scientists when they received preliminary confirmation of a 10-year-old theory from a fluid science experiment that is currently orbiting the Earth on the Foton-M3 spacecraft.

In a simple experiment on a mixture of water, surfactant (soap), and an organic salt, two researchers working in the Pritchard Fluid Mechanics Laboratory at Penn State have shown that a rigid object like a knife passes through the mixture at slow speeds as if it were a liquid, but rips it up as if it were a rubbery solid when the knife moves rapidly.