Flowing fluids that act like the interlocking teeth of mechanical gears offer a possible route to novel machines that suffer less wear-and-tear than traditional devices. This is the finding of researchers at New York University (NYU) in the US, who have been studying how fluids transmit motion and force between two spinning solid objects. Their work sheds new light on how one such object, or rotor, causes another object to rotate in the liquid that surrounds it – sometimes with counterintuitive results.

“The surprising part in our work is that the direction of motion may not be what you expect,” says NYU mathematician Leif Ristroph, who led the study together with mathematical physicist Jun Zhang. “Depending on the exact conditions, one rotor can cause a nearby rotor to spin in the opposite direction, like a pair of gears pressed together. For other cases, the rotors spin in the same direction, as if they are two pulleys connected by a belt that loops around them.”

Making gear teeth using fluids

Gears have been around for thousands of years, with the first records dating back to 3000 BC. While they have advanced over time, their teeth are still made from rigid materials and are prone to wearing out and breaking.

Ristroph says that he and Zhang began their project with a simple question: might it possible to avoid this problem by making gears that don’t have teeth, and in fact don’t even touch, but are instead linked together by a fluid? The idea, he points out, is not unprecedented. Flowing air and water are commonly used to rotate structures such as turbines, so developing fluid gears to facilitate that rotation is in some ways a logical next step.

To test their idea, the researchers carried out a series of measurements aimed at determining how parameters like the spin rate and the distance between spinning objects affect the motion produced. In these measurements, they immersed the rotors – solid cylinders – in an aqueous glycerol solution with a controllable viscosity and density. They began by rotating one cylinder while allowing the other one to spin in response. Then they placed the cylinders at varying distances from each other and rotated the active cylinder at different speeds.

“The active cylinder should generate fluid flows and could therefore in principle cause rotation of the passive one,” says Ristroph, “and this is exactly what we observed.”

When the cylinders were very close to each other, the NYU team found that the fluid flows functioned like gear teeth – in effect, they “gripped” the passive rotor and caused it to spin in the opposite direction as the active one. However, when the cylinders were spaced farther apart and the active cylinder spun faster, the flows looped around the outside of the passive cylinder like a belt around a pulley, producing rotation in the same direction as the active cylinder.

A model involving gear-like- and belt-like modes

Ristroph says the team’s main difficulty was figuring out how to perform such measurements with the necessary precision. “Once we got into the project, an early challenge was to make sure we could make very precise measurements of the rotations, which required a special way to hold the rotors using air bearings,” he explains. Team member Jesse Smith, a PhD student and first author of a paper in Physical Review Letters about the research, was “brilliant in figuring out every step in this process”, Ristroph adds.

Another challenge the researchers faced was figuring out how to interpret their findings. This led them to develop a model involving “gear-like” and “belt-like” modes of induced rotations. Using this model, they showed that, at least in principle, a fluid gear could replace regular gears and pulley-and-belt systems in any system – though Ristroph suggests that transmitting rotations in a machine or keep timing via a mechanical device might be especially well-suited.

In general, Ristroph says that fluid gears offer many advantages over mechanical ones. Notably, they cannot become jammed or wear out due to grinding. But that isn’t all: “There has been a lot of recent interest in designing new types of so-called active materials that are composed of many particles, and one class of these involves spinning particles in a fluid,” he explains. “Our results could help to understand how these materials behave based on the interactions between the particles and the flows they generate.”

The NYU researchers say their next step will be to study more complex fluids. “For example, a slurry of corn starch is an everyday example of a shear-thickening fluid and it would be interesting to see if this helps the rotors better ‘grip’ one another and therefore transmit the motions/forces more effectively,” Ristroph says. “We are also numerically simulating the processes, which should allow us to investigate things like non-circular shapes of the rotors or more than just two rotors,” he tells Physics World.

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Launch companies are divided on how to compete with SpaceX in a market where demand outstrips supply, yet customers remain price sensitive.

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A new class of biomolecules called magneto-sensitive fluorescent proteins, or MFPs, could improve imaging of biological processes inside living cells and potentially underpin innovative therapies.

The fluorescent proteins commonly used in biological studies respond solely to light being shone at them. But because that light gets scattered by tissues there are inaccuracies in determining exactly where the resulting fluorescence originates. By contrast, the MFPs created by a team led by Harrison Steel, head of the Engineered Biotechnology Research Group at the University of Oxford in the UK, fluoresce partly in response to highly predictable magnetic fields and radio waves that pass through biological tissues without deflection.

To detect where MFPs are located within living cells, the researchers apply both a static magnetic field with a precisely known gradient and a radiofrequency (RF) signal, which modulate the fluorescence triggered via excitation by a light-emitting diode (LED).

The emitted fluorescence is brightest whenever the RF is in resonance with a transition energy of the entangled electron system present within the MFP. Since the resonance frequency depends on the surrounding magnetic field strength, the brightness reveals the protein’s location.

As detailed in their recent Nature paper, the researchers engineered the MFPs by “directed evolution”: starting with a DNA sequence, making two to three thousand variants of it, and selecting the variants with the best fluorescence response to magnetic fields before repeating the entire process multiple times. The resulting proteins were tested via ODMR (optically detected magnetic resonance) and MFE (magnetic-field effect) experiments, revealing that they could be detected in single living cells and sense their local microenvironment.

Importantly, these MFPs can be made in research labs using a straightforward biological technique. “This is a totally different way of coming up with new quantum materials compared to other engineering efforts for quantum sensors like nitrogen vacancies [in diamonds] which need to be manufactured in highly specialized facilities,” explains first author Gabriel Abrahams, a doctoral student in Steel’s research group. Abrahams helped develop quantum diamond microscopes during his master’s in physics at the Quantum Nano Sensing Lab in Melbourne, Australia before moving onto the Oxford Interdisciplinary Bioscience Doctoral Training Programme.

The MFPs were inspired by the work of study co-authors Maria Ingaramo and Andy York, both then working for Calico Life Sciences. They had observed a small change in fluorescence when a magnet interacted with a quantum-enabled protein, explains Abrahams. “That was really cool! I hadn’t seen anything like that, and there were clearly potential applications if it could be made better,” he says.

Steel tells Physics World that “a lot of the past work in quantum biology was with fragile proteins, often at cryogenic temperatures. Surprisingly you could easily measure these MFPs in single living cells every few minutes as they can work for a long time at room temperature”. Furthermore, using MFPs only requires adding a magnet to existing fluorescence microscopy equipment, allowing new data to be cost-effectively obtained.

“For instance, you might use three or four fluorescent proteins to tag natural processes in a mammalian cell in a petri dish to see when they are being used and where they go. We could instead tag with 10 or 15 MFPs, allowing you to measure extra targets by just applying a magnetic field,” Steel explains.

Quantum engineer Peter Maurer from the University of Chicago in the US, who was not involved in the study, is enthusiastic about these new MFPs. “By combining magnetic fields and fluorescence, this work establishes an exciting new imaging modality with broad potential for future evolution. Notably, similar approaches could be directly applicable to qubits [quantum bits], such as the fluorescent protein qubits our team published in Nature last year,” he says.

Next, Steel intends to improve their instrumentation for using MFPs – much of which was adopted from researchers investigating how birds navigate via the earth’s magnetic field. Future MFP applications could include microbiome studies sensing where bacteria travel in our bodies, and the development of highly controllable actuators for drug delivery. “If you would like to turn on the protein’s ability to bind to a cancer cell, for example, you could simply put a magnet on the outside of a person in the right location,” he concludes.

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MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — The U.S. Federal Communications Commission’s Space Bureau is pursuing an ambitious agenda for regulatory reform. The space plank of the FCC’s Build America Agenda would allocate additional spectrum for space activities, streamline the satellite licensing process and give spacecraft operators more flexibility to modernize operations. “We’re seeking to extend the reach […]

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MILAN — United Kingdom-based launch company Orbex announced that its business is folding after multiple attempts to stay solvent fell through.  The company announced Feb. 11 that it has filed a notice of intention to appoint administrators — a process in the U.K. that’s similar to declaring bankruptcy — after fundraising, merger and acquisition efforts […]

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SEATTLE, Feb. 11, 2026 — Integrate, the developer of the world’s first ultra-secure project management platform for dynamic multi-entity execution, today announced a $17 million Series A raise led by FPV Ventures with participation from Fuse […]

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MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – At the recent World Economic Forum in Switzerland, much of the conversation revolved around the concerns of middle powers, nations with the wherewithal to influence international events that are not among the great powers. At the SmallSat Symposium in Mountain View, representatives of Earth-observation companies said middle powers that previously relied […]

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MILAN — The French-German aerospace company The Exploration Company completed mock splashdown tests for its Nyx space capsule, a modular, reusable spacecraft designed to transport cargo and eventually crew to low Earth orbit and beyond. The company conducted water-impact tests on a mock capsule from Jan. 13 through 28. The testing campaign was not a […]

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The Duke of Edinburgh visited the headquarters of the Institute of Physics (IOP) in central London on 5 February to learn about the role that physics plays in supporting the green economy.

The event was attended by about 100 business leaders, policy chiefs, senior physicists, and IOP and IOP Publishing staff. It highlighted how physics research is helping to deliver clean energy solutions and support economic growth.

A total of 12 companies took part in an exhibition that was visited by the duke. They included two carbon-capture firms – Nellie Technologies and Promethean Particles – as well as the fusion firm Tokamak Energy and Sunamp, which makes non-flammable “thermal batteries”.

The other firms were Intelligent Energy, Matoha Instrumentation, NESO, Oxford Instruments, Inductive Power Projection, QBA, Reclinker and Treeconomy.

The event included a panel debate chaired by Tara Shears, the IOP’s vice-president for science and innovation.

It featured ex-BP boss John Browne, who now works in green energy, along with Sizewell C energy-strategy director David Cole, Nellie Technologies founder Stephen Millburn, solar-cell physicist Jenny Nelson from Imperial College, and Emily Nurse from the UK’s Climate Change Committee.

After the debate, the duke said the event had showcased “some of the brilliant ideas that are trying to solve some really challenging issues through creativity and imagination”. He expressed particular delight that people are central to that mission.

“Our ability to evolve the right skills for the future has been well demonstrated here,” he said. “It comes down to creating the right climate to allow these ideas to flourish and come to market. We simply cannot drop this issue.”

Tom Grinyer, group chief executive of the IOP, reminded delegates that physics is fundamental to the UK economy. “We’re seeing how research is translating into real-world solutions that matter today, from clean power and climate intelligence, to advanced materials and future technologies,” he said.

But he warned that long-term investment in young people will be vital to create the physicists and business leaders who can tackle those challenges.

• For more about physics and the green economy, check out the environment and energy channel on Physics World and IOP Publishing’s Environmental Research Letters series of journals.

The post Duke of Edinburgh informed about physics and the green economy at visit to Institute of Physics in London appeared first on Physics World.