TURBULENCE IN SOAP FILMS. Understanding the mystical swirls of the Great Red Spot of Jupiter and the majestic flows of the Atlantic Ocean can be enhanced by studying the patterns in the humble soap film, the thin slab of water sandwiched between two layers of soap molecules (surfactants). The fluid in soap films moves principally in two spatial dimensions, just like the aforementioned geophysical flows. Researchers at Los Alamos (Peter Vorobieff, 505-667-8090) have performed the first quantitative measurements of the properties throughout an entire soap film, rather than at just one or several points, which was previously the case. They added highly reflective titanium dioxide particles to the fluid, and snapped pictures with a digital camera, obtaining detailed images of thousands of points of the fluid every 160-300 microseconds. Sending the film through a comb, they produced a turbulent flow and measured such quantities as vorticity--essentially the measure of the fluid's swirling motion, with faster-moving and more tightly curving swirls leading to greater vorticity values. From this they determined the enstrophy (vorticity squared) and found evidence of "enstrophy cascade," in which energy was transferred from larger- to smaller-sized eddies before being dissipated there. This experiment paves the way for using soap films to further study 2D turbulence. (Rivera et al., Physical Review Letters, 17 August 1998; See Image at Physics News Graphics. Also see Los Alamos writeup on this topic.)