Inside most materials, little is moving. But a new "active nanocomposite" is teeming with motion: small particles connect or separate, thus changing the color of the entire material. It was made ...

In a solid, these particles are packed closely together and are not free to move about within the substance. Molecular motion for the particles in a solid is confined to very small vibrations of ...

Lots of materials are solid, such as paper, bricks, wood, metal, and ice. The particles in solids are very close together, therefore they cannot usually be compressed or squashed.

Imagine a liquid that flows freely one moment, then stiffens into a near-solid the next, and then can switch back with a ...

There are some similarities, but the corn starch particles in oobleck are one-hundredth the size of grains of sand (between 1 to 10 microns). At those small size scales, the physics is markedly ...

Figure 3. Erosive wear – Erosive wear involves progressive loss of original material from a solid surface because of mechanical interaction between that surface and a fluid, multi-component fluid, or ...

The particles of a gas are much more spread out and move more independently compared to the particles of liquids and solids. Whether a substance is a solid, liquid, or gas at a certain temperature ...

The size of particles found in a colloidal dispersion range between 1 and 1000 nanometres. The two components are referred to as the dispersed phase and continuous phase respectively. Either phase can ...

The liquid state of matter is an intermediate phase between solid and gas. Like the particles of a solid, particles in a liquid are subject to intermolecular attraction; however, liquid particles ...