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

This may be new to slashdot

[arodland]

But it certainly isn't new. I'm quite sure that I read about it at least a year ago. "New state of matter" is a bit of a stretch; it's more that "heavy particle gases" are enough unlike ideal gases that they do some relatively interesting things. As I understand it, the point of studying them is to gain a better understanding of more mundane gases in interesting situations like turbulent flow.

Also, I seem to remember that some years back there was an experiment done on the space shuttle involving a mess of ball bearings in microgravity that was also intended to study the same thing.