{"id":227186,"date":"2025-12-16T01:40:36","date_gmt":"2025-12-16T07:40:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/12\/the-hidden-physics-of-knot-formation-in-fluids"},"modified":"2025-12-16T01:40:36","modified_gmt":"2025-12-16T07:40:36","slug":"the-hidden-physics-of-knot-formation-in-fluids","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/12\/the-hidden-physics-of-knot-formation-in-fluids","title":{"rendered":"The hidden physics of knot formation in fluids"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/the-hidden-physics-of-knot-formation-in-fluids2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Knots are everywhere\u2014from tangled headphones to DNA strands packed inside viruses\u2014but how an isolated filament can knot itself without collisions or external agitation has remained a longstanding puzzle in soft-matter physics.<\/p>\n<p>Now, a team of researchers at Rice University, Georgetown University and the University of Trento in Italy has uncovered a surprising physical mechanism that explains how a single filament, even one too short or too stiff to easily wrap around itself, can form a knot while sinking through a fluid under strong gravitational forces.<\/p>\n<p>The discovery, <a href=\"https:\/\/link.aps.org\/doi\/10.1103\/z7jb-fvjl\" target=\"_blank\">published<\/a> in <i>Physical Review Letters<\/i>, provides new insight into the physics of polymer dynamics, with implications ranging from understanding how DNA behaves under confinement to designing next-generation soft materials and nanostructures.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Knots are everywhere\u2014from tangled headphones to DNA strands packed inside viruses\u2014but how an isolated filament can knot itself without collisions or external agitation has remained a longstanding puzzle in soft-matter physics. Now, a team of researchers at Rice University, Georgetown University and the University of Trento in Italy has uncovered a surprising physical mechanism that [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-227186","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-nanotechnology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/227186","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=227186"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/227186\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=227186"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=227186"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=227186"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}