When we take a stroll on the beach, we walk on the sand without any trouble. The sand appears solid and is difficult to compress. When we put the same sand grains in an hourglass, they behave very ...

Understanding the way a wave moves through granular materials—after an earthquake, for example—has vast implications for modern science. After all, scientists use stress wave propagation through ...

Granular materials and fine powders are used across various industrial processes and applications. To optimize and control processing methods, these materials have to be characterized precisely.

Editor’s note: The following research is among the many talks that scientists from UChicago and its affiliated laboratories will present Feb. 13-17 at the annual meeting of the American Association ...

Slip sliding away: illustration based on false-colour image of sheared grains and sound waves. (Courtesy: Ted Brzinski) A new experiment has revealed how sheared granular materials emit sound waves ...

Jacqueline Reber receives funding from the Iowa State University College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Frontier Science Fund. Did you eat cereal this morning? Or have you walked on a gravel path? Maybe ...

Johns Hopkins engineers have uncovered new details about how granular materials such as sand and rock behave under extreme impacts—findings that could someday help protect the Earth from dangerous ...

Mixing liquids is easy, or at least scientifically understood: a drop of food coloring will eventually mix into a cup of water through diffusion, and a dollop of cream can be mixed into coffee with a ...

Examples of granular matter: multicolored plastic balls in a playground, gravel, sesame seeds and lentils (clockwise from top left). Images by Julia Kertesz, Martin Olsson, Jitender Kumar and Zyance ...

Stress wave propagation through grainy, or granular, materials is important for detecting the magnitude of earthquakes, locating oil and gas reservoirs, designing acoustic insulation and designing ...