Tibetan singing bowls
Tibetan singing bowls, ancient instruments used for meditation, can be manipulated to produce droplets that levitate, bounce and skip across water.
When one adds water to a Tibetan singing bowl and plays – often by tracing the edge with a mallet – the bowl’s haunting sound is accompanied by ripples on the water’s surface. That’s because the mallet pushes on the side of the bowl – made from bronze alloy that is more malleable than glass – and deforms it on a microscopic scale.
A new paper from the journal Nonlinearity explores the behavior of water droplets in the bowls. I wrote about it in this article for New Scientist.