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For decades, physicists, engineers and mathematicians have failed to explain a remarkable phenomenon in fluid mechanics: the natural tendency of turbulence in fluids to move from disordered chaos to perfectly parallel patterns of oblique turbulent bands. This transition from a state of chaotic turbulence to a highly structured pattern was observed by many scientists, but never understood. For decades, physicists, engineers and mathematicians have failed to explain a remarkable phenomenon in fluid mechanics: the natural tendency of turbulence in fluids to move from disordered chaos to perfectly parallel patterns of oblique turbulent bands. This transition from a state of chaotic...

Enlarge Image Underpass. Appropriately sculpted ripples on the ocean floor could convert surface waves into internal interfacial waves, allowing them to pass under a floating object and protecting the thing from jostling. Credit: M.-R. Alam, PhysRevLett, 108 (24 February, 2012) The weird science of invisibility has entered uncharted waters. By altering the sea floor in just the right way, it should be possible to hide an object floating on the sea from passing waves, a fluid mechanician predicts. The technique might help to protect ships and floating structures from rough seas. And because the scheme works entirely differently from...

The unexpected finding could provide insight into the creation of the universe, scientists say. Researchers smashing gold atoms together to mimic conditions in the first microseconds after the creation of the universe have observed an unexpected new state of matter. Instead of the thin, fiery gas of quarks and gluons that they expected, they found instead a dense drop of the elementary particles that behaves like a hitherto unseen "perfect fluid." It is "a truly stunning finding," said Raymond L. Orbach, director of the Department of Energy's Office of Science. Quarks are the fundamental building blocks of protons, neutrons and...