Motor Made From Liquid Film

KentuckyFC writes "Last year, a group of Iranian physicists made a puzzling discovery. They placed a thin film of water in a small cell and bathed it in two perpendicular electric fields. To their surprise this caused the water to rotate. They called their device a liquid film motor and posted on the web a cool set of movies showing the phenomenon. The puzzle is this: the electric fields are static, so what's driving the motor? Now another group of physicists has the answer: a complex interaction between the electric field, the cell container and the liquid causes water to move along the cell wall. Crucially, it moves in opposite directions on opposite sides of the cell and so sets up a circular flow. The phenomenon works only when friction and surface tension are significant forces so the effect is entirely scale dependent. That's probably why we haven't seen it before and also why it could have important implications for microfluidic devices such as lab-on-a-chip."

Comments

Re:good for iran

[Ash Vince]

He also said that attaching a high status to scholars and scientists in society would help talents to flourish and science and technology to become domesticated, thus ensuring the country's progress and development.[28]

Now if only we in the west would catch up and do the same.

I now earn more than my friend doing vital scientific research into the human brain and the effects of ageing. He has a PhD and has just published his first paper. I flunked out of uni while studying a Physics BSc. Go figure.

The fact is that in our society the main status symbol is how much you earn, yet we pay people like teachers or university lecturers a pittance compared to the people who cause global financial disasters with an excess of greed. Yet our governments are throwing money at a thoroughly broken capitalist system that to me seems grossly unfair by design and also on the brink of collapse due to its bias towards the people at the top of the tree.

Re:Not Often...

[TubeSteak]

I found this lead quote to be interesting with many subtle and not so subtle implications

Westerners assume that the Middle East is a 14th Century backwater and cannot contribute to the world in meaningful ways.
Ditto for religious fundamentalists and non-capitalists.
Where would they ever get such ideas?
/News at 11