If you’ve ever watched a flock of birds move in perfect unison or seen ripples travel across a pond, you’ve witnessed nature’s remarkable ability to coordinate motion. Recently, a team of scientists and engineers at Rice University discovered a similar phenomenon on a microscopic scale, where tiny magnetic particles driven by rotating fields spontaneously move along the edges of clusters driven by invisible “edge currents” that follow the rules of an unexpected branch of physics. The research was published in the journal Physical Review Research.

The near-bottom water on the U.S. Northeast continental shelf provides a critical cold-water habitat for the rich regional marine ecosystem. This “cold pool” preserves winter temperatures, even when waters elsewhere become too warm or salty during the summer.

•           The U.S. Northeast coastal ocean has experienced accelerated warming in recent years, compared to the global average. Now, scientists using salt as a tracer are investigating how much the influx of salty offshore water onto the continental shelf contributes to the observed “erosion” of the seasonal cold pool.

•           This paper provides the first evidence for a seasonal salinification of the cold pool on the US Northeast continental shelf, as consistently observed in the multi-year mooring record of the [Ocean Observatories Initiative] Coastal Pioneer Array.

More than 400 underwater sites in the United States are potentially contaminated with unexploded ordnance — weapons that did not explode upon deployment. Connor Hodges studies the changes in the acoustic characteristics of these UXOs after they have been subject to corrosion and biofouling to help detect them underwater and will discuss the use of acoustics for corroded UXO recovery on Monday, May 19, at the 188th ASA Meeting.

Physicists have now discovered a material that can be very useful in crafting tomorrow’s quantum technology: clay.