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New look for "Newton's bucket" What happens when you rapidly rotate the bottom plate of an otherwise stationary cylinder filled with water? According to new work by physicists in Denmark, you produce rotating polygons with up to six corners on the water's surface. This new and spectacular type of "instability" could be used to study a wide variety of complex systems in physics, including rotating flows on Earth, hydraulic machinery in industry, vortices and tornadoes (Phys. Rev. Lett. 96 174502).
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