Fluid

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved the first intranasal diuretic for heart, liver and kidney disease patients, aiming to prevent a common and costly issue that results in more than a million hospitalizations each year.

We’re willing to bet you’ve never given much thought to how bugs urinate, but even if you did you probably wouldn’t imagine them using butt-based pinball paddles to flick drops of pee at 40 G’s, using physics never before seen in nature.

Researchers at MIT have observed “electron whirlpools” for the first time. The bizarre behavior arises when electricity flows as a fluid, which could make for more efficient electronics.

Bubbles aren’t known for their long lifespans, usually only giving a few seconds of childlike joy before they pop. A team of French scientists has developed a new way to make bubbles last longer, with the record holder surviving for well over a year.

Nobody likes needles – at best they’re an unpleasant means to an important end. Microneedle patches could be a painless alternative, and now researchers have developed a way to use them to detect biomarkers at much lower levels without drawing blood.

If you pushed a ball with negative mass, it would move towards you. It might be hard to picture, but according to Newtonian physics it should be possible. Now a team at Washington State University has demonstrated the phenomenon in practice, creating a fluid that has the properties of negative mass.

An unusual state of matter, first theorized almost 50 years ago, has been created in experiments for the first time. Say hello to the supersolid, a state where atoms simultaneously exhibit a crystalline structure but still flow like a frictionless fluid.