Philippe Matthews Show Guru Advice, Author Reviews, Tech Reviews, Entertainment News

Stir lots of small particles into water, and the resulting thick mixture appears highly viscous. When this dense suspension slips through a nozzle and forms a droplet, however, its behavior momentarily reveals a decidedly non-viscous side.

'Sub-Bragg diffraction' is what researchers at the Complex Photonic Systems group of the University of Twente’s MESA+ Institute for Nanotechnology call their surprising observations. An ‘energy dip’ can also occur when reflection takes place in regular crystal structures at ultra-low energy frequencies . Theoretically, the lowest energy at which this can take place has been unshakably fixed for almost a century, as predicted in the so-called Bragg conditions.

Dark chocolate, blue potatoes and lemon macaroons! Find out what other surprising foods can help feed your brain and improve mood.

TODAY’s Savannah Guthrie and Matt Lauer discuss details of the surprising split between celebrities Heidi Klum and Seal after 7 years of marriage. (TODAY)

Global abortion rate has stabilized since 2003, but new study shows other surprising trends

(PhysOrg.com) -- Matter in the subatomic realm is, well, a different matter. In the case of strongly correlated phases of matter, one of the most surprising findings has to do with a phenomenon known as the Hall response – an important theoretical and experimental tool for describing emergent charge carriers in strongly correlated systems, examples of which include high temperature superconductors and the quantum Hall effect.

Editor's note: The following is an excerpt adapted from the book, People Will Talk: The Surprising Science of Reputation , by John Whitfield (Wiley, 2011). Copyright

In 1961 Stanley Milgram embarked on a research program that would change psychology forever. Fueled by a desire to understand how ordinary Germans had managed to participate in the horrors of the Holocaust, Milgram decided to investigate when and why people obey authority. To do so, he developed an ingenious experimental paradigm that revealed the surprising degree to which ordinary individuals are willing to inflict pain on others.

In the May 2011 issue of Scientific American mathematician John Baez co-authors "The Strangest Numbers in String Theory," an article about the octonions, an eight-dimensional number system that was discovered in the mid–19th century but that has been largely ignored until quite recently. As the name of the article implies, interest in the octonions has been rekindled by their surprising relationship to recent developments in theoretical physics, including supersymmetry, string theory and M-theory.