Jia Huang

A drop of oil in water behaves like a tiny ball: it seeks the spot with the least energy. If a wall is nearby, the drop often sticks to it, just as a raindrop spreads on glass. In a mixture of two immiscible liquids, such as polyethylene glycol and dextran, tiny droplets of one liquid form inside the other.

The Sun constantly emits a stream of charged particles, mostly hydrogen — the solar wind. Sometimes the Sun ejects dense blobs of magnetized gas, inside which calm usually reigns. But in 2000, scientists noticed two regions inside one such cloud where the gas was churning.

Before every tokamak startup, a device where superheated gas is held by magnetic fields, operators spend hours calculating how the plasma will behave. Mistakes are too costly: one wrong parameter can ruin the experiment.