MILKY WAY IN THE LABORATORY? A plasma with a spiral-shaped pattern of particle density, similar to that of the Milky Way galaxy, has been created stably in the laboratory, supporting the possibility that fluid dynamics effects rather than gravitational ones may be responsible for our home galaxy's structure. Injecting a hot argon plasma (rotating at supersonic speeds) into a cold, stationary argon gas, researchers in Japan (Takashi Ikehata,Ibariki University, ikehata@ee.ibaraki.ac.jp) observed a spiral-armed structure (with low-density halos of charged particles) that persisted for as long as they kept rotating the plasma. The vortices that typically appear in such hot plasmas became spirals because of the outward "centrifugal" forces introduced by the rotation. Curiously, the spiral structure was not observed to form in the absence of the stationary gas, suggesting that the fluid dynamics interactions between the gas and plasma are central to the spiral formation process. This experiment intensifies the fascinating (and still undecided) question of whether similar interactions occur between hot, bright stars (corresponding to the plasma) and gas clouds (analogous to the stationary gas) to form spiral galaxies. (Ikehata et al., Physical Review Letters, 31 August 1998.)