'ice-skating' droplets move in orbits
They look like planets. Two droplets move in orbits on an ice cold fluid surface. They attract each other, and by almost frictionless movement on their own vapour, they skate around each other. It is a fascinating mechanism that could be used for preparing and transporting biological samples with a minimum of contamination. Researchers of the University of Twente publish about this in their paper ‘Capillary Orbits’ in Nature Communications of 2 September.

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Max Planck Gesellschaft
Centre for Scientific Computing