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A fabric's physical properties, such as its wettability and porosity, affect the dynamics of an impacting droplet. Understanding these effects can help forensic scientists draw a better picture of a crime scene. In a paper that appeared in Physics of Fluids, UvA-physicist Thijs de Goede and collaborators from UvA, ETH Zürich, Empa (Switzerland) and the University of Sherbrooke (Canada) develop a physics-based approach to blood droplet analysis.

With the temperatures outside below zero and the speed skating world championships around the corner, ice is on everyone's mind. One thing we all know: ice is slippery - but why? This seemingly simple physics question turns out to have a remarkably intricate answer. In a new publication that appeared in Physical Review X this week, a group of UvA physicists shed new light on how temperature, pressure and the speed of the skater combine to make it possible to skate on ice.

An interdisciplinary team of researchers from the Universities of Konstanz and Amsterdam have uncovered a new state of matter, liquid glass, with previously unknown structural elements. The discovery leads to new insights into the nature of glass and its transitions. While glass is a truly ubiquitous material that we use on a daily basis, it also represents a major scientific conundrum.

'Entanglement' is a ubiquitous concept in modern physics research: it occurs in subjects ranging from quantum gravity to quantum computing. In a publication that appeared in Physical Review Letters last week, UvA-IoP physicist Michael Walter and his collaborator Sepehr Nezami shed new light on the properties of quantum entanglement - in particular when many particles are involved.

Have you ever been amazed by a curveball goal scored by Diego Maradona, Lionel Messi or Christiano Ronaldo? Then you have - possibly without knowing it - been exposed to the Magnus effect: the fact that spinning objects tend to move along curved paths. In a new publication that appeared in Physical Review Letters this week, Robert Spreeuw shows that the same effect occurs to atoms moving through light - and that this effect has practical consequences.

Sometimes, the inside of a material can determine what happens on the outside. A team of physicists from the University of Amsterdam has devised a new way to make use of this general truth, in particular in systems that do not conserve energy. The results were published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week.

Dark matter might be disappearing and sending its signal - but not very fast - in dwarf satellite galaxies Dark matter is even more elusive than thought before. This is the main message of a new study by a group of scientists that includes Shin'ichiro Ando of the Institute of Physics at the University of Amsterdam.

Gels occur everywhere in our everyday life, but the precise way in which they form is not very well understood. Combining experimental observations and numerical models, physicists from the universities of Amsterdam and Cambridge and from Unilever have now shown that gel formation is closely related to another well-known physical process: percolation.

A team of physicists from the universities of Stanford and Amsterdam, led by UvA-physicist Jorik van de Groep, have constructed a new type of lens, with a thickness of only a single layer of atoms, that can be turned on and off at will. Such tuneable optical elements have promising applications, for example in augmented and virtual reality.

In a paper that appeared in the journal Physical Review Letters this week, astrophysicists from the University of Amsterdam propose a new way of potentially detecting dark matter. Astrophysicists Thomas Edwards, Marco Chianese and Bradley Kavanagh, from the groups of Samaya Nissanke and Christoph Weniger at the GRAPPA center of excellence, have studied the gravitational waves produced by the merger of a neutron star and a black hole.

When salty water evaporates, the salt can crystallize and creep over a long distance. This effect, which can cause serious problems in for example outdoor electronics, was investigated in detail by a team of UvA-researchers led by Noushine Shahidzadeh. Their results were published in Science Advances in December.