Just this week I watched Nova’s overly produced documentary on string theory, The Elegent Universe, thinking that I should finally try to grok the coolest thing in quantum theory since Schr?ger’s Cat and parallel universes. But New Scientist reports the theory is a bit tangled these days:

Physicists at the University of Chicago are researching a new fluid state essentially created by dropping a marble into loosely packed sand. This produces a jet of sand grains that briefly behaves like a special type of dense fluid. Perhaps the craziest part is you can duplicate the experiment at home. (Read the full story).