Picture it: a nice, ripe tomato. Your not-so-recently sharpened kitchen knife. You press the blade down into the soft flesh and… it explodes. Soft solids – like a tomato – Keep reading
Tag: gels
Branching Gels
If you sandwich a viscous fluid between two plates, then pull the plates apart, you’ll often get a complex branching pattern that forms as air pushes its way into the Keep reading
Drying Out
Look closely at old paintings, and you’ll notice arrays of tiny, straight cracks that form as the paint dried. This sort of pattern formation during drying is not unusual. Here Keep reading
Salty Comets
Many of the products we use every day in our homes behave like solids until the right force is applied. These yield-stress fluids are like hand sanitizer – strong enough Keep reading
Liquid Pearls
Researchers create liquid pearls–a liquid droplet surrounded by a gel-like exterior–by dropping the fluid through a special bath. The initial droplet contains a mixture of the liquid core and an Keep reading
Gelatin
Gelatins are actually colloidal gels, or a liquid dispersed inside a solid, cross-linked network. The crosslinks give the gelatin structure, but much of its dynamic behavior remains reminiscent of fluid Keep reading