Superhydrophobic knife slices up water

Do you ever find that your water droplet carving leaves something to be desired? Does the droplet spring back or split apart, creating smaller satellite droplets? What you need, it would seem, is the superhydrophic knife from the lab of Antonio García at Arizona State University in the US.

Garcia's team showed that a water drop pinned by wire loops can be reproducibly cut without the formation of satellite droplets. The cutting was done using a superhydrophobic knife, once the two loops were pulled slightly to stretch the droplet. The team have been investigating this phenomenon as a way of separating molecules in small samples, but the work also gives further insight into the interesting way that water behaves.