NASA’s Curiosity rover has stumbled on the largest patch of polygon-shaped ground fractures it has ever seen on Mars, a discovery that could reveal more about the planet’s watery past.
The post Curiosity Finds Massive Field of Honeycomb-Shaped Fractures on Mars appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.
Explorer for Artemis Geology, Lunar, and Earth — a NASA satellite program to study surface biology and geology on Earth, with technologies that could support future missions to the Moon and Mars.
NASA’s EAGLE program — Explorer for Artemis Geology, Lunar, and Earth — will be a series of satellite missions studying surface properties using technologies for Earth observation that will also benefit future missions to the Moon and Mars, where they could identify critical resources and safe landing sites.
The satellites making up the first two EAGLE missions will study biology and geology on Earth’s surface to support agriculture, disaster response, and other needs. Each mission will carry a different instrument with capabilities that complement each other. The first mission (EAGLE-VSWIR) is scheduled to take flight in 2028.
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EAGLE-VSWIR (Visible to Shortwave Infrared) will observe the Earth’s surface every 16 days with a high-resolution imaging spectrometer, which measures light reflected from the planet’s surface, separating wavelengths across the visual and into the infrared spectrum. The patterns created by light being reflected or absorbed across this spectral range act like fingerprints, letting scientists identify the composition of the surface.
A similar instrument, NASA’s EMIT (Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation), has been monitoring Earth from the International Space Station since July 2022, characterizing the surface mineral composition of Earth’s arid lands, monitoring ecosystem status, and tracking health and safety hazards — such as methane leaks and acid mine drainage — among other applications.
EAGLE-VSWIR will have 25 times more capability than EMIT has today. This technological leap will allow scientists to map surface deposits of critical and rare-earth minerals, strengthen food security, and aid wildfire prevention and recovery. It can also highlight environmental hazards such as oil spills or landslide risks, and monitor water quality and availability.
The EAGLE-TIR mission will provide Thermal InfraRed (TIR) imagery when it launches two to three years after EAGLE-VSWIR, measuring energy emitted from the surface and producing data that scientists can use to map temperature, composition, and critical mineral deposits. On Earth that would let researchers monitor wildfires and volcanic activity, track drought and water use by crops, study urban heat islands, observe the rates that snow or ice accumulates or melts, and better understand Earth’s resilient ecosystems.
EAGLE-TIR follows on from ECOSTRESS (ECOsystem Spaceborne Thermal Radiometer Experiment on Space Station), which has been observing Earth from the International Space Station since 2018. ECOSTRESS was designed to study how different ecosystems respond to drought and water stress, and the data has provided a vital understanding of how plants’ water use changes throughout the day. Since ECOSTRESS also measures emitted energy in the thermal infrared, its surface-temperature products have also been used for urban planning and wildfire monitoring.
Further innovation and lessons learned from ECOSTRESS has led to EAGLE-TIR, which will carry a multi-band thermal radiometer. EAGLE-TIR’s great strength compared to existing missions is that it provides detailed imagery of the entire globe every two days, day and night, at multiple wavelengths not available from other instruments.
By advancing vital techniques for measuring our planet’s surface composition, resources, and hazards, the EAGLE program addresses critical needs in Earth observation, with technologies that can also transfer to planetary exploration, where they’ll serve as pathfinders for future missions to the Moon and Mars.
NASA unveiled the EAGLE program as one part of its “Ignition” event on March 24, 2026, when it announced a wide-ranging series of transformative agencywide initiatives. With EAGLE (the Explorer for Artemis Geology, Lunar, and Earth missions), NASA will deploy breakthrough hyperspectral images across Earth with later missions anticipated for the Moon and Mars in rapid succession. On Earth they’ll identify critical minerals for national security, enable precision agriculture, and support disaster response. On Earth and at Mars they will locate critical minerals and resources such as ice for propellants, rare-earth elements for technology, and construction materials for habitats.
EMIT (Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation) measures the mineral composition of Earth’s dust source regions, to help scientists understand how they heat or cool our planet.
Learn More About EMITECOSTRESS (ECOsystem Spaceborne Thermal Radiometer Experiment on Space Station) is accurately measuring the temperature of plants on Earth.
Learn More About ECOSTRESSYour home. Our Mission. And the one planet that NASA studies more than any other.
The Moon makes Earth more livable, sets the rhythm of ocean tides, and keeps a record of our solar system's…
Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun, and the seventh largest. It’s the only planet we know of inhabited…
Media Resources Enabling Commercial Lunar Transportation to Support a Sustained Lunar Base NASA is seeking information from established commercial providers…
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A new look at more than two decades’ worth of archival data from NASA’s Spirit mission suggests that the Martian soil may hold iron-bearing minerals -- hematite and altered magnetite -- that were too faint for scientists to detect in real time during the mission.
The post Hidden Clues in Spirit Rover Data Suggest Mars Once Had Far More Water than Scientists Realized appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.
Federal-state stoush comes as rating agency warns that electricity bills could skyrocket
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Queensland and the Northern Territory have rejected the federal government’s plans to mandate that AI datacentres use renewable power, rubbishing Anthony Albanese’s proposals to regulate the booming technology as “underdeveloped ideas that hand increased power to Canberra”.
The latest federal-state stoush on energy comes as S&P Global, the economic rating agency, warns that power use from datacentres could rise five-fold by 2035 to 10% of Australia’s total consumption, and that a mismatch between delivery timelines for datacentres and renewable projects could lead to energy bills skyrocketing.
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© Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images
© Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images
© Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images
Europa’s subsurface ocean has long topped astrobiologists’ wish lists as a place to search for life beyond Earth.
The post Europa’s Ice Shell May Be Tougher Barrier than Planetary Scientists Hoped appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.
Constant access to a supply of freshwater is critical for life on this planet, as well as for the growth of industry, agriculture and modern-day economies. But natural water supplies are depleting in many parts of the world, with around 2.2 billion people lacking safely managed drinking water, according to United Nations estimates.
Many countries rely on converting ocean water into freshwater using desalination plants. But the reverse osmosis and thermal distillation techniques currently used are energy intensive and leave behind brine that raises the salt level of the water (and reduces oxygen levels), which can harm sea life.
Researchers from the University of Rochester have taken a new approach by developing a solar-thermal desalination process that’s less energy intensive, doesn’t generate brine and doesn’t require chemical additives to pre-treat the water.
“Today, about one quarter of the global population lacks safely managed drinking water; but at the same time the oceans contain an enormous resource of both water and valuable minerals,” explains lead researcher Chunlei Guo. “We wanted to develop a technology that could address these challenges together, producing freshwater sustainably while turning what is traditionally considered waste into a resource.”
The novel desalination technology, described in Light: Science & Applications, is based on a multi-functional superwicking black metal (SWBM) panel created via femtosecond laser processing. Desalination involves evaporating and distilling the water, removing the salt in the process. To do this, materials that absorb sunlight and heat up, while wicking water, are required. The SWBM panel proved effective at both.
The SWBM panel is highly attractive to water and can pull a thin film of water upwards across its surface, while absorbing almost all solar energy. This uphill pulling of water against gravity means that the panel can be placed in any orientation, enabling effective solar tracking.
The evaporated and distilled water can be extracted from the panel and the remaining salts are directed away from the panel’s active region and deposited in its passive (untreated) regions. This not only self-cleans the active region of the panel, but enables continuous desalination to produce distilled drinking water.
This approach means that concentrated brines are not deposited back into the ocean, and the solid salt can be collected and used to produce common table salt. The process also extracts other precious minerals such as lithium, which could be used in battery manufacturing. As traditional land-based mining becomes more expensive, extracting lithium directly from ocean water could prove a lower-cost, more sustainable option.
“The most important advance is that our system can desalinate real ocean water continuously using sunlight alone, without generating waste, with little to no maintenance and while recovering valuable minerals such as lithium,” says Guo. “By using a superwicking, self‑cleaning surface invented in my lab to move salts away from the evaporation region, we overcame the clogging bottleneck that has limited solar desalination until now. This is the first time we have achieved stable, low‑maintenance, high‑efficiency and nearly 100% salt-recovery performance with actual seawater.”
The self-cleaning mechanism is vital for use in real-world scenarios. Many desalination technologies work in the lab where the only mineral component is sodium chloride. Ocean water, however, contains many other materials, such as magnesium and calcium salts, that could crystallize on the panel and clog it. The self-cleaning process is driven by etched grooves that stop these minerals from staying on the panel. If oceans contain too high a mineral content, wider and deeper grooves can be etched into the panel by applying a higher laser power during fabrication.
The team tested the solar-thermal desalination panel using water samples from Pacific, Atlantic and Indian Oceans. When tracking the sun over a week to purify the ocean water, the panel demonstrated an average evaporation rate of 1.76±0.04 kg/m2/h and a salt harvesting rate of 61.74 ± 2.46 kg/m2/h under one sun illumination, corresponding to 74% solar-to-vapour conversion efficiency and near-100% salt extraction.
The researchers are now working to scale up the technology and integrate it with other mature platforms, such as solar cells. “We have made significant progress by demonstrating that the desalination process can be used to cool the solar cells, improving electrical output while simultaneously producing freshwater. This approach could lead to a synergistic water-energy system that operates sustainably,” Guo tells Physics World.
The post Solar-thermal desalination process operates at near 100% efficiency appeared first on Physics World.
A remarkable discovery has been made in East Africa’s Lake Malawi, one of the deepest bodies of water on the African continent.
Africa’s impressive lakes have long remained a focus of speculation for naturalists, involving folklore about strange creatures—including supposed holdovers from prehistoric times—alleged to inhabit some of their waters.
However, a much smaller discovery made by a team of researchers with the Department of Zoology at the University of British Columbia (UBC) at Vancouver, Canada, is nonetheless challenging our past thinking on what kinds of life forms can be found lurking in the depths of some of Africa’s storied lakes.
In a remarkable discovery, a variety of lake fly larvae have been found descending into the very oxygen-deprived depths of Lake Malawi, where they hide more than 650 feet below the surface to avoid predators.
After spending their days in this deep-water “dead zone,” the larvae reemerge at night and feed—or at least some of them do, if they are lucky enough to escape the fish searching for a dinner of their own, while these tiny insects are commuting back to the surface.
To chart the unusual daily cycle of these larvae, UBC researchers Dr. Philip Matthews and Dr. Evan McKenzie used sonar technologies, which were positioned deep within the lake.
While this provided an idea about where these tiny insects were going, it was dissecting the larvae that revealed how these remarkable little creatures have somehow evolved a respiratory system that contains two pairs of small air sacs, which function like ballast tanks, allowing the larvae to control their buoyancy.
Within these sacs, they discovered the presence of resilin, a material that can either expand or contract in proportion to changes in the pH of the sac’s walls. As a result, the larvae can change the volume of these unique air sacs, thereby controlling their buoyancy.
It is an unusual capability these creatures display, to say the least. Curious about how deep they might be able to go, the researchers placed several of the larvae within small pressure chambers to simulate the depths they might travel to before the sacs imploded.
Much to the team’s surprise, these natural buoyancy systems held out under conditions that would match depths of 400 meters (1,312 feet), which is much deeper than what the sonar data reveals about the larvae’s daily descents into Lake Malawi.
While it has long been assumed that insects, which often thrive in freshwater environments, do not live in open oceans due to such pressures associated with the depths of the world’s largest bodies of water, these African insect larvae reveal that such creatures can survive under such conditions.
Based on their findings, the UBC researchers hope to work on finding ways of simulating such capabilities, perhaps by creating pH-powered resilin smart materials, or even artificial systems that emulate the way muscles operate.
The team’s findings appeared in the new study, “Crush-resistant air sacs allow insect larvae to exploit aquatic habitats at extreme depth,” published in the journal Science.
Micah Hanks is the Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder of The Debrief. A longtime reporter on science, defense, and technology with a focus on space and astronomy, he can be reached at micah@thedebrief.org. Follow him on X @MicahHanks, and at micahhanks.com.
There's one very stinky reason why Labour's ambitious housebuilding targets are doomed to fail, says Mike Wells: Britain's creaking sewers and drainage systems simply can't cope with all the demands of new homes.
The post There’s One Very Stinky Reason Why Labour’s Housebuilding Targets Are Doomed to Fail appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.
Water and spice influenced eating in opposite and unexpected ways during controlled meal experiments. A glass of water beside a meal is often treated as an easy way to eat less. The usual explanation is that the water stretches the stomach and creates a sense of fullness before too much food is consumed. A Cornell [...]A new review of previous studies in the journal Appetite undercuts the popular belief that water fills you up at the table.
The post Researchers Challenge Long-Held Beliefs about Water, Spicy Food and Digestion appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.
A new study in npj Urban Sustainability points to the practical levers that determine whether stormwater systems actually deliver long-term sustainability. As cities expand and rainfall extremes intensify, green and nature-based infrastructure has been promoted to capture runoff, reduce flooding, and protect water quality. But the research warns that success is not automatic: design decisions and operational realities can make or break performance.
The authors, Sun, Randrup, Blecken and colleagues, analyze what they call “decisive factors” governing sustainable stormwater management. Their central message is that the most visible features—such as bioswales, permeable surfaces, or detention basins—only work when supported by the right planning assumptions and measurable hydrological outcomes.
A key technical theme is how stormwater must be matched to system capacity under changing conditions. The study emphasizes that system sizing, soil or media properties, and infiltration or storage behavior strongly influence whether the infrastructure can handle typical storms and rare, high-intensity events. When these factors are misestimated, treatment efficiency can collapse during peak flows.
Equally important are maintenance and lifecycle considerations. Sustainable stormwater is sensitive to clogging, sediment accumulation, vegetation health, and changes in catchment behavior. The research highlights the need for maintenance regimes that reflect likely failure modes, rather than generic schedules that ignore local hydrology and traffic or land-use impacts.
The paper also stresses the value of monitoring and model-informed decision-making. Reliable data on rainfall patterns, runoff routing, and pollutant loads allow managers to validate performance and adjust operations. This feedback loop helps prevent long-term degradation that otherwise remains invisible until issues become costly.
For cities seeking viral, widely transferable “what works” guidance, the authors’ findings offer a shortlist of priorities: realistic capacity planning, robust material characterization, design for multi-storm performance, and maintenance strategies tied to specific mechanisms. Together, these elements translate sustainability goals into systems that function under real weather and real urban change.
The study’s DOI is 10.1038/s42949-026-00448-4.
Subject of Research: Sustainable stormwater management / urban sustainability
Article Title: Decisive factors in sustainable stormwater management
Article References: Sun, Z., Randrup, T.B., Blecken, GT. et al. Decisive factors in sustainable stormwater management. npj Urban Sustain 6, 104 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42949-026-00448-4
Image Credits: AI Generated
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s42949-026-00448-4
Apple TV on Thursday announced an all-new season five of the beloved, award-winning animated kids and family series “Stillwater,” premiering with five episodes on Friday, August 21, 2026. Based on the bestselling Scholastic “Zen” book series by Jon J Muth, “Stillwater” follows a wise panda who teaches three young siblings about the world and each other. The series centers on siblings Karl (Judah Mackey), Addy (Eva Ariel Binder) and Michael (Tucker Chandler), who encounter everyday challenges — big and small — which sometimes feel insurmountable. Fortunately for these three, they have Stillwater (James Sie), a wise panda, as their next-door neighbor. Through his example, stories and gentle humor, Stillwater teaches the children the concept of mindfulness, while offering them a deeper understanding of their feelings as well as tools that help them face their own day-to-day challenges. “Stillwater” is produced for Apple TV by Gaumont and Scholastic Entertainment.
Take a deep breath and embrace your inner peace by embarking on a fun adventure with the first four seasons of “Stillwater” available on Apple TV. Through breathing exercises, mindful moments and simple everyday practices, this uplifting, Peabody and Daytime Emmy Award-winning series invites you and your family to discover your own zen through each episode. “Stillwater” was produced through Apple TV’s changemakers initiative in collaboration with awareness and intention expert Mallika Chopra, author of “Buddha and the Rose” and the “Just Be” series for kids.
Gaumont and Scholastic Entertainment produce, with Sidonie Dumas, Nicolas Atlan, Terry Kalagian, Iole Lucchese, Caitlin Friedman, Jef Kaminsky, Jun Falkenstein and Rob Hoegee serving as executive producers. In addition, the series features the voice talents of Sie, Binder, Chandler and Mackey.
The exciting slate of recent offerings for kids and families on Apple TV also features “My Brother the Minotaur,” from Academy Award-nominated animation studio Cartoon Saloon and award-winning children’s media company Dog Ears; “Wonder Pets: In the City,” from Emmy Award winner Jennifer Oxley and produced by Nickelodeon Animation; animated adventure trilogy “WondLa,” based on the New York Times bestselling book series “The Search for WondLa” by Tony DiTerlizzi; highly anticipated kids and family series “Yo Gabba GabbaLand!” inspired by the hit, Emmy Award-nominated cultural phenomenon “Yo Gabba Gabba!”; season two of Emmy Award-winning “Shape Island,” based on the internationally bestselling picture books from Mac Barnett and Jon Klassen; animated fantasy adventure series “The Sisters Grimm,” based on Michael Buckley’s New York Times bestselling book series; the music-driven animated comedy series “BE@RBRICK” from DreamWorks Animation; “Goldie,” inspired by Emily Brundige’s award-winning 2019 short film of the same name, and many more.
Award-winning all-ages offerings now streaming globally on Apple TV also include the BAFTA Award and Emmy Award-winning live-action animated hybrid special “The Velveteen Rabbit,” BAFTA Award and Humanitas Prize-winning “El Deafo,” BAFTA Award-winning “Lovely Little Farm,” “Duck & Goose,” “Get Rolling With Otis,” Spin Master Entertainment’s “Sago Mini Friends,” Emmy Award-winning “Frog and Toad,” based on the Caldecott and Newbery Honor-winning books, Annie Award-nominated “Not a Box,” GLAAD Media Award-nominated “Pinecone & Pony,” The Jim Henson Company’s Emmy Award-winning “Fraggle Rock: Back to the Rock,” “Harriet the Spy” and “Slumberkins,” Sesame Workshop’s “Helpsters,” Joseph Gordon-Levitt, HITRECORD and Bento Box Entertainment’s “Wolfboy and the Everything Factory,” Jack McBrayer and Angela C. Santomero’s and Emmy Award-nominated “Hello, Jack! The Kindness Show.” Live-action offerings include “Me,” an elevated cinematic coming-of-age story from Barry L. Levy, Bonnie Hunt’s DGA Award and WGA Award-nominated “Amber Brown,” DGA Award-winning “Best Foot Forward,” “Surfside Girls,” WGA Award-winning “Life By Ella,” Sesame Workshop and Sinking Ship’s Emmy Award-winning “Ghostwriter,” Emmy Award and Environmental Media Association Award-winning “Jane,” and Scholastic’s “Puppy Place.” “Here We Are: Notes for Living on Planet Earth,” the Emmy Award-winning television event based on the New York Times bestselling book and TIME Best Book of the Year by Oliver Jeffers, is also featured.
Apple TV offers premium, compelling drama and comedy series, feature films, groundbreaking documentaries, and kids and family entertainment, and is available to watch across all of a user’s favorite screens. After its launch on November 1, 2019, Apple TV became the first all-original streaming service to launch around the world, and has premiered more original hits and received more award recognitions faster than any other streaming service in its debut. To date, Apple Original films, documentaries and series have been honored with 850 wins and 3,737 award nominations and counting including multi-Emmy Award-winning and history-making comedies “The Studio” and “Ted Lasso,” global cultural phenomenon “Severance,” Apple’s most-viewed drama “Pluribus,” Academy Award Best Picture winner “CODA” and Academy Award winner “F1,” the highest-grossing sports feature of all time.
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The post Apple TV’s beloved kids series ‘Stillwater’ set to premiere all-new fifth season August 21st appeared first on MacDailyNews.
A new analysis suggests the four sub-Earth exoplanets orbiting Barnard’s star -- the Sun’s nearest single-star neighbor -- are likely packed with the deep-Earth mineral periclase, stripped of their atmospheres and far too hostile to support life.
The post Barnard’s Star Planetary System May Be Filled with Water-Poor Rocky Worlds appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.
Four scientists could soon live and work beneath the Florida Keys for days.The properties of water are unusual among liquids—it expands when it freezes, reaches its highest density just above freezing, and does not behave like the simple liquids chemists often use to understand matter.
Now, a new study in Communications Chemistry uses artificial intelligence to compare competing methods for measuring water’s hidden molecular order and determine which are truly effective.
Researchers at the University of Osaka developed a neural network to test 16 different ‘structural descriptors,’ which are mathematical tools for measuring how ordered or disordered water molecules are at the microscopic scale. Over the past 30 years, scientists have independently developed these descriptors, each with its own approach and scale, all aimed at explaining the same underlying puzzle.
Until now, researchers lacked a standard method for comparing them directly—a gap this study fills.
To establish a common standard, the Osaka team trained a neural network using molecular dynamics simulations of water at temperatures from 200 to 300 Kelvin. Using only the values from a single structural descriptor, it had to predict the temperature at which each molecular configuration was generated. If a descriptor captured meaningful structural information, the network could easily distinguish hot from cold.
“Past studies have shown that using machine learning to classify and understand structural data is effective,” says corresponding author Kang Kim. “We specifically wanted to incorporate a neural network model into this study to evaluate how accurate the descriptors were at capturing key structural information, in a way that is like human cognition.”
The network assessed each descriptor using a standard classification measure. To deepen their analysis, the team used an explainable AI technique called LIME. This method looks at how the model makes its decisions and checks whether its reasoning matches established physical principles, instead of relying only on statistical patterns.
Out of the 16 descriptors tested, two stood out. The Local Structure Index (LSI) and another, referred to as zeta (ζ), both of which measure the distance between the first and second layers of neighboring molecules, achieved nearly perfect accuracy across the tested temperatures. Another group, based on how hydrogen bonds connect, also scored well but was not as accurate as the others. Older descriptors that rely on tetrahedral angles or interaction energies became less accurate at higher temperatures, where molecules move more, and the differences blur.
“The network used what it had learned to compare how 16 descriptors differentiated between LDL and HDL structures at different temperatures,” says senior author Nobuyuki Matubayasi. “In this way, we determined the most efficient descriptors.”
The LIME analysis backed up the network’s results with evidence consistent with scientists’ expectations. Molecules with high Local Structure Index and zeta values led the model to predict lower temperatures, which is consistent with the idea that more ordered, LDL-like structures appear as water cools. This suggests that the network captured more than just statistical correlations.
With a common framework for comparing descriptors in place, researchers could attempt to develop descriptors that directly identify HDL and LDL environments rather than infer them indirectly. Whether these new tools will finally solve one of water’s biggest mysteries, the point where its two proposed liquid forms fully separate, is something scientists are just starting to investigate.
Austin Burgess is a writer and researcher with a background in sales, marketing, and data analytics. He holds an MBA, a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration, and a data analytics certification. His work focuses on breaking scientific developments, with an emphasis on emerging biology, cognitive neuroscience, and archaeological discoveries.
A team of physicists set out to recreate a 60-year-old quantum mystery using a large water tank. While their experiment produced the expected results, it also revealed an unexpected behavior in the water.
The experiment centered on the Aharonov–Bohm effect, a strange quantum phenomenon where electrons respond to a magnetic field even when they never actually pass through it. First predicted back in 1959, this effect has been notoriously difficult to confirm because the changes it causes in electron waves are incredibly subtle.
Instead of using electrons and a particle accelerator, researchers from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST), along with collaborators in Oslo and Chile, recreated the effect using water waves, making an otherwise invisible quantum effect visible in a tabletop experiment. The team reported their findings in Communications Physics.
“With waves traveling the opposite direction, you see a mirror image pattern,” says Jonas Rønning, co- author and former postdoc in the OIST unit. “The question for us was, what happens if you send waves from both directions at the same time? We thought that the patterns might cancel each other out, or both pitchfork-like patterns would be visible, but our intuition was completely wrong.”
The researchers constructed a custom tank, created a vortex at its center, and sent waves from opposite sides to meet in the middle. They used a high-speed camera to observe how the waves interacted on the water’s surface.
Without a vortex, the peaks and troughs remain in place. When the vortex is there, the standing wave breaks down. The vortex shifts the phase of the waves as they travel around it, altering the standing-wave interference pattern and creating rotating nodal lines. These are lines of momentarily flat water that spiral outward and turn in the opposite direction of the vortex.
“This was something new and unexpected,” says Aditya Singh, a PhD student in the Nonlinear and Non-equilibrium Physics Unit and co-first author of the study. “That’s what makes this fluid analogue system so valuable. It reveals topological effects — wave behaviors that occur across the whole system — that can’t be seen in quantum experiments.”
At first, the team suspected their equipment was causing the rotating lines. However, the same pattern also appeared in their computer simulations.
“When we first saw these lines, we thought they were an experimental artifact,” Singh says. “But when we also saw them in our simulations, we dropped everything and quickly worked out the mathematics underlying how they arise.”
As the strength of the vortex increased, more rotating nodal lines appeared, always moving in the direction opposite to the vortex. The study showed that the number of lines is quantized, meaning it is fixed to whole-number values determined by the vortex’s circulation. In other words, the topology of the vortex determines how many rotating nodal lines appear. This effect was observed across the entire wave field, not just near the vortex core as earlier models suggested.
This finding differs from Berry’s original experiment, which observed changes only near the vortex. In this case, the researchers discovered a non-local effect, a pattern that covers the entire system and depends on the overall setup. Instead of being limited to the area near the vortex, the rotating nodal lines appeared throughout the whole standing-wave pattern.
Although the practical uses of these newly discovered nodal patterns are not yet clear, the study shows that simple classical systems can reveal behaviors that are challenging to observe in quantum experiments. By making these effects visible, the researchers plan to explore more complex wave systems that could offer new insights into superconductivity and other quantum phenomena.
“One direction is to make the system more complex by introducing multiple vortices and arranging them into a lattice,” senior author Mahesh Bandi says. “That setup would mirror conditions in some superconducting materials, with the water waves behaving like a supercurrent. We don’t yet know what we’ll see — and that’s exactly what makes it worth doing.”
Austin Burgess is a writer and researcher with a background in sales, marketing, and data analytics. He holds an MBA, a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration, and a data analytics certification. His work focuses on breaking scientific developments, with an emphasis on emerging biology, cognitive neuroscience, and archaeological discoveries.
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