What vestiges of liquid behavior remain in such ultra-low surface tension limit?
Physicists seeking to answer this question have, for the first time, measured the nanoscale forces that cause droplet formation in a falling stream of tiny glass beads. John Royer, a graduate student in physics at the University of Chicago, devised a special apparatus for an $80,000 high-speed camera to image the rapidly changing behavior of the streaming sand, much as a skydiver might photograph a fellow jumper in free fall.
