This is Scientific American's 60-Second Science. I'm Sarah Vitak.

If you're kitchen savvy, you probably know the water test method for getting stainless steel pans to the right temperature.

All you have to do is splash a few drops of water in a pan as it's being heated.

And when the pan reaches the right temperature, instead of evaporating, the drops will form into beads and they skate all over the pan.

You have to do this test in an empty pan. And that's because as the not so kitchen savvy among us may have learned the hard way, mixing oil and water in a hot pan is a recipe for flying burning hot liquids.

The phenomenon that happens when beads of water skate around in your empty pan has been understood for a long time. Here is Dr. Kripa Varanasi from the mechanical engineering department at MIT explaining it.

They're levitating on their vapor layer or the vapor cushion that's forming because of the liquid evaporating.

And so they can move around with very little friction that's called the lieide and frost state.

And then if you're at a lower temperature, you could start boiling the drop.

But the drop is sticking to the surface.

But recently Dr. Varanasi and his graduate student Victor Leon set out to look at hot oil and water interactions a bit more closely.

What we found here that's very interesting is when you have a thin oil layer and you have the drop on it, you still can get both those states.

But in between, there is another state where it can race at very high speeds on the surface.

The requirements were so simple, you could run them in your kitchen. They just use a hot plate with either a piece of metal or a silicon wafer on top.

Then they added the oil, they used silicon oil, then a syringe to place a water drop.

The one thing they did a little more precisely than you would in the kitchen is that they applied the oil by spin coating.

So that's a process that creates a very thin and very uniform surface.

Their oil layer was about 10 microns or about a hair's width thick. Then they used high speed imaging equipment to capture the result.

And what they saw in these videos was that when the droplets were placed on the hot oil, they would propel themselves in random directions at very high speeds.

Several things about this were surprising. First, that the droplet propels itself. It was clear pretty quickly how that was happening.

The easy way to think about this is it's called momentum transfer. So if you take a balloon and blow air in it and you release it, the balloon just flies everywhere.

Similar to the balloon, what was happening on the hot plate was that the oil was forming a thin layer around the drop.

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