Dancing Droplets: Researchers Solve the Strange Puzzle of Attraction Found in Drops of Food Coloring

“We’ve discovered how droplets can exhibit behaviors akin to artificial chemotaxis,“ Prakash said. As the Nature article explains, the critical fact was that food coloring is a two-component fluid. In such fluids, two different chemical compounds coexist while retaining separate molecular identities The droplets in this experiment consisted of two molecular compounds found naturally in food coloring: water and propylene glycol. The researchers discovered how the dynamic interactions of these two molecular components enabled inanimate droplets to mimic some of the behaviors of living cells.