Knots are not just for shoelaces and sailing lines. In the last decade, physicists have shown that swirling liquids can ...

How do you tie water in a knot? First you make parts of it into vortices, which move more like long continuous strings than groups of autonomous molecules. Then you need to tangle those strings ...

In a new Nature Physics study, researchers created particle-like so-called “vortex knots” inside chiral nematic liquid crystals, a twisted fluid similar to those used in LCD screens. For the first ...

More than a century after the idea was first floated, physicists have finally figured out how to tie water in knots in the laboratory. The gnarly feat, described today in Nature Physics, paves the way ...

Tying a knot in a smoke ring sounds like a feat worthy of those enjoying a certain kind of cigarette. But treat smoke as an example of a fluid, and it becomes a physics problem. Now for the first time ...

From our star’s excess heat to the complexities of fluid turbulence, many a mystery might be unravelled by the bane of the headphone wearer – knots What if atoms weren’t solid spheres, as most ...

My kids love to have water balloon wars. I do too if I am being honest. The drag for me is that neither of my kids can tie their own balloons and tying off a bunch of balloons that will hit you is no ...

Reporting in the journal Nature Physics, William Irvine and Dustin Kleckner, physicists at the University of Chicago, have created a knotted fluid vortex in the lab — a scientific first, they say. The ...