Very fine sand is prepared in a well-defined and fully decompactified state by letting gas bubble through it. After turning off the gas stream, a steel ball is dropped on the sand. On impact of the ball, sand is blown away in all directions ("splash") and an impact crater forms. When this cavity collapses, a granular jet emerges and is driven straight into the air. A second jet goes downwards into the air bubble entrained during the process, thus pushing surface material deep into the ground. The air bubble rises slowly towards the surface, causing a granular eruption. In addition to the experiments and the discrete particle simulations we present a simple continuum theory to account for the void collapse leading to the formation of the upward and downward jets.

A bidisperse granular gas in a compartmentalized system is experimentally found to cluster competitively: Depending on the shaking strength, the clustering can be directed either towards the compartment initially containing mainly small particles or to the one containing mainly large particles. The experimental observations are quantitatively explained within a flux model.

A compartmentalized bidisperse granular gas clusters competitively [Phys. Rev. Lett. 89, 214301 (2002)]]: By tuning the shaking strength, the clustering can be directed either towards the compartment initially containing mainly small particles or to the compartment containing mainly large particles. Here, the conditions under which this competitive clustering occurs are studied experimentally, numerically (by means of molecular dynamics simulations), and analytically. A minimal model is derived that quantitatively accounts for the observed phenomena.

In this Letter we show that the transition from laminar to active behavior in extended chaotic systems can vary from a continuous transition in the universality class of Directed Percolation with infinitely many absorbing states to what appears as a first order transition. The latter occurs when finite lifetime non-chaotic structures, called "solitons", dominate the dynamics. We illustrate this scenario in an extension of the deterministic Chaté-Manneville coupled map lattice model and in a soliton including variant of the stochastic Domany-Kinzel cellular automaton.

Vascular damage induced by acute hypertension is preceded by a peculiar pattern where blood vessels show alternating regions of constrictions and dilations ("sausages on a string"). The pattern occurs in the smaller blood vessels, and it plays a central role in causing the vascular damage. A related vascular pattern has been observed in larger vessels from several organs during angiography. In the larger vessels the occurrence of the pattern does not appear to be related to acute hypertension. A unifying feature between the phenomenon in large and small vessels seems to be an increase in vascular wall tension. Despite much research, the mechanisms underlying the sausage pattern have remained unknown. Here we present an anisotropic model of the vessel wall and show that the sausage pattern can arise because of an instability of the vessel wall. The model reproduces many of the key features observed experimentally. Most importantly, it suggests that the "sausaging" phenomenon is neither caused by a mechanical failure of the vessel wall due to a high blood pressure nor is it due to standing pressure waves caused by the beating of the heart. Rather, it is the expression of a general instability phenomenon. Experimental data suggest that the structural changes induced by the instability may cause secondary damage to the wall of small arteries and arterioles in the form of endothelial hyperpermeability followed by local fibrinoid necrosis of the vascular wall.