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Unexpected Solidlike Fracture in Simple Liquids

98 points by Anon84

by jzer0cool

0 subcomment

This seems more of inertia, Newton's first law. "An object at rest stays at rest,...". What comes to mind say there is some threshold acceleration (e.g. or at extreme, accelerate to c within some short time, t), then essentially you have a body at rest and breaks at the weakest point. Interesting would be seeing this effect with varying viscosity.

by immmmmm

5 subcomments

> a project in collaboration with the oil and gas company Exxon Mobil
I find it a bit dark that, at a time people, crops, forests and biomes are dying due to extreme heat caused by the fossil fuel industry’s reckless behaviour the last 50 years, the said fossil fuel industry funds research on exotic rheology.

by brador

0 subcomment

Should be called semi-rigid fluids. They have a structure, it’s just weak and breaks at weak points as you would expect.

by dd8601fn

1 subcomments

by dataflow

4 subcomments

Second comment for a semi-off-topic question: does the state of matter depend on the gravity?
Thought-experiment: take any solid, put it in an infinitely strong cup, and crank up gravity. At some point gravity overwhelms the forces holding the substance together and thus the substance ends up breaking apart and.. filling the cup just like a liquid, no?
Does everything become liquid-like at sufficiently high gravity? How does one distinguish what's a solid or a liquid when gravity seems to make them behave similarly?

by nelox

1 subcomments

Turns out glass has been known to be a fluid and to fracture for quite some time.
[edit: but glass is not a simple fluid.]

by dataflow

3 subcomments

I must be missing something.
If something is a fluid... or at least a liquid... that means it... flows, right?
Flow speed isn't infinite, so whenever you pull apart a liquid, you'll see some remnant of the pre-flow state. The thicker the liquid, the slower you need to pull it apart to see that.
Is this surprising? Why wouldn't every liquid do this? In what way is this somehow special to some liquids and not others?

by animanoir

0 subcomment

by nycdweller349

6 subcomments

Someone tell me the industries that are going to benefit the most from this in the short and long term and what I can expect to see in the next 30 years as a result of this discovery.