Okay, this one is for Nick, too, in his guise as a weather geek. NASA Earth Observatory picked up the press release for this:
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/view.php?id=41646&src=eorss-manews But it turns out that the New Journal of Physics is open sourced, so you can go read the original paper: http://www.iop.org/EJ/abstract/1367-2630/11/12/123001 The gist is that they built an apparatus for observing heat flow in fluids at realistic Rayleigh numbers and discovered that the turbulent regime doesn't develop according to theory, it goes through at least two unexpected phase transitions both of which take the net heat transfer in the opposite direction from that expected. -- rec --
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