Droplets don’t have to be round – here’s one squished into a square

Don't be a square — Don’t be a square – or do

By Chelsea Whyte

DROPS of liquid are usually round, but they don’t have to be. Researchers sandwiched drops of glycerol between stretched elastic films to see what shapes they could make – and were surprised to produce a square.

Rafael Schulman and Kari Dalnoki-Veress at McMaster University in Canada started with a thin film lying flat on a silicon surface, and deposited a droplet around 100 nanometres in diameter on top. Then they placed a second film over the droplet. When the tension in the top film was equal in all …