May the force be with you :)

Researchers have discovered how particles bunch up in liquids, a discovery that will help to explain how life functions on planet earth.

Ocean particle accumulation has long been understood as the result of chance collisions and adhesion. But an entirely different and unexpected phenomenon is at work in the water column. Like so many discoveries, this one began accidentally. A graduate student intended to show a favorite parlor trick -- how spheres dumped into a tank of salt water will "bounce" on their way to the bottom, as long as the fluid is uniformly stratified by density. But the student in charge of the experiment made an error in setting up the density of the lower fluid. The spheres bounced and then hung there, submerged but not sinking to the bottom. Credit: Robert Hunt/UNC-Chapel Hill

The smart thing the student did was to not clean up the mess. :)

You can see the phenomenon at work in a video the researchers produced. Plastic microbeads dropped into a container of salt water topped with less dense fresh water are pulled down by the force of gravity and thrust upward by buoyancy. As they hang suspended, the interplay between buoyancy and diffusion—acting to balance out the concentration gradient of salt—creates flows around the microbeads, causing them to slowly move. Rather than moving randomly, however, they clump together, solving their own jigsaw-like puzzles. As the clusters grow, the fluid force increases.

"It's almost like we discovered an effective new force," Camassa said.

May the force be with you. :)