The Curtain Is Pulled Down

Destabilization of a viscous film flowing down in the form of a vertical cylindrical curtain.

In this Letter, we study experimentally a viscous liquid curtain in an annular geometry. Gap and median radius can be varied in such a way that the base of the initially stationary cylindrical curtain is led to oscillate by decreasing the flow rate. Standing and traveling waves in the plane of the annulus are observed and a nontrivial expression linking pulsation to flow rate per surface unit a...

Fluctuating pulled fronts & Pomerons

I give a physical discussion of the influence of particle number fluctuations on the high energy evolution in QCD. I emphasize the event–by–event description and the correspondence with the problem of ‘fluctuating pulled fronts’ in statistical physics. I show that the correlations generated by fluctuations reduce the phase–space for BFKL evolution up to saturation. Because of that, the evolutio...

Pulled Fronts and the Reproductive Individual

In War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy expressed his opinions about the importance of “great men” in determining the outcome of historical processes. He said that particular individuals are relatively unimportant in comparison to the overall “forces of history”, comprising the actions, ideas, and emotions of the masses of human beings. Amusingly enough, the relative importance of the individual and the ...

Just a pulled hamstring?

Hepcidin: inflammation's iron curtain.

Editorial Hepcidin: inflammation's iron curtain Rheumatologists and their patients are the beneficiaries of a recently identified peptide, hepcidin (Table 1). Isolated from human urine and plasma in the year 2000 [1, 2], hepcidin appears to be the long-sought iron-regulatory hormone responsible for the anaemia of chronic disease [3, 4]. It is more than that: it is an acute-phase reactant, respo...