When you mix cornstarch with water, you get a gloopy liquid with a strange property: its viscosity increases the faster you try to move through it or deform it. Back when my kids were in grade school, they informed me that the stuff now has an official name: “oobleck”.
It turns out that oobleck behaves very entertainingly indeed when pumped with low-frequency acoustic energy. Have a look here.
That’s oobleck at 30 Hz. at the other end of the acoustical spectrum is ultrasound, which is used in cool-mist humidifiers. Here’s a clip of that in action.
Finally, we have “ferrofluid”: an emulsion of surfactant-isolated ferromagnetic nanoparticles suspended in a carrier such as kerosene. Ferrofluid does some very entertaining things in a magnetic flux gradient, as you can see here.
2 Comments
“ferrofluid”
I wonder if we could make a liquid metal terminator with ferrofulid …
The first oobleck video looked like a comic version of souls writhing in hell. The ferrofluid was hypnotic, and I also had T-1000 thoughts.