Researchers Discover That Sand Behaves Like Water

Xeger writes "University of Chicago researchers have found that streams of sand can behave in a similar manner to liquids, forming water-like droplets when poured from a funnel. To obtain these results, they dropped their expensive high-speed camera from a height of several meters and observed the sand forming into droplets — something that shouldn't happen without surface tension. These findings suggest that conventional engineering wisdom about sand, dirt and other grainy materials needs to be rethought, and that it might be possible to apply fluid dynamics to some solids problems."

Comments

Doh!

[Toad-san]

What? Someone let the physicists out of their labs?

This has been intuitively obvious for _my_ entire life; and they just get around to noticing?

Sand hell. Watch the films of some massive landslides (including boulders weighing hundreds of tons). They're just as fluidic as they can be ... and damn-all static attraction too.