Simple Experiment Creates Surprising State of Matter

When you're done making baking soda volcanoes, and coercing hamsters into flying model airplanes:

Here's a science experiment you can pretty much duplicate at home:

Physicists at the University of Chicago essentially dropped a marble into loosely packed sand, producing a jet of sand grains that briefly behaves like a special type of dense fluid.

They describe it as a novel state of matter.

"We're discovering a new type of fluid state that seems to exist in this combination of gas—air in this case—and a dense arrangement of particles," said lead researcher Heinrich Jaeger. "It's just a most amazing phenomenon.

(Source: livescience)