Marble and Sand Creates a New State of Matter

An anonymous reader writes "LiveScience has a story about a surprisingly simple experiment (yes, you can try this at home) at room temperature that yielded a jet of sand that behaves similar to jets created in ultra-dense gas near absolute zero. From the article: 'We're discovering a new type of fluid state that seems to exist in this combination of gas--air in this case--and a dense arrangement of particles.'"

Comments

Re:The result looks like a simple sine wave to me.

[Pikapp]

It's not that the resulting wave acts in a novel manner, what is suprising is the column of matter that shoots up afterwards (the jet). Quick and Dirty Summary of the aricle: As you increase ambient pressure on a losely packed cluster of particles you would expect the pressure response from a force to be lessened, resulting in a smaller jet. Instead the high pressure in-between the particles seems to act as a turbocharger, creating a larger force - evidenced by the much higher jet.