Water pours into a cup at about the same rate regardless of whether the water bottle is made of glass or plastic. Georgia Tech associate professor Elisa Riedo poses with a glass water bottle and a plastic water bottle. While container materials don’t significantly affect the rate at which water pours from bottles of this size, a new study shows that the properties of containers at the nanoscale dramatically affect the viscosity of water. Credit: Rob Felt   But at nanometer-size scales for water and potentially other fluids, whether the container is made of glass or plastic does make a significant difference. A new study shows that in nanoscopic channels, the effective viscosity of water in channels made of glass can be twice as high as water in plastic channels. Nanoscopic glass channels can make water flow more like ketchup than ordinary H2O. The effect of container properties on the fluids they hold offers yet another example of surprising phenomena at the nanoscale. And it also provides a new factor that the designers of tiny mechanical systems must take into account. “At the nanoscale, viscosity is no longer constant, so these results help redefine our understanding of fluid flow at this scale,” said Elisa Riedo, an associate

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