Planets can be extremely hot when they are born, and new computational experiments show that such planets would have an atmosphere composed of a homogenous mixture of hydrogen and water. As the planets age, their temperature decreases, and the hydrogen and water begin to separate. The subsequent rainout of water could not only generate an unexpected amount of heat deep inside these worlds but reshape the composition of atmospheres and evolution of these planets for billions of years. The work has implications for potentially habitable exoplanets with a hydrogen atmosphere overlying a water ocean, depending on the planets’ internal temperatures. 

In a crowded room, we naturally move slower than in an empty space. Surprisingly, worms can show the exact opposite behaviour: in an environment with randomly scattered obstacles, they tend to move faster when there are more obstructions. Viewing the worms as ‘active, polymerlike matter’, researchers at the University of Amsterdam have now explained this surprising fact.

Researchers at Osaka Metropolitan University have developed a straightforward method for predicting the measurement precision of fringe projection photogrammetry.

New research led by a York University professor sheds light on the earliest days of the earth’s formation and potentially calls into question some earlier assumptions in planetary science about the early years of rocky planets. Establishing a direct link between the Earth’s interior dynamics occurring within the first 100 million years of its history and its present-day structure, the work is one of the first in the field to combine fluid mechanics with chemistry to better understand the Earth's early evolution.