Any water droplet can dance. All it needs is the right dance floor.

Take, for instance, the water drops bouncing around in Yanlin Song’s lab. They twist, twirl and even pirouette after falling onto a special surface he and his colleagues designed.

Dr. Song and his team at the Institute of Chemistry at the Chinese Academy of Sciences study how surfaces interact with water droplets, research that applies everywhere, from your car’s windshield to the wings of an airplane.

To make their surfaces, the researchers covered small alumina plates with a super- water-repellent coating. Then, the team exposed the plates to ultraviolet light, to create water-adhesive designs on top of the coating. When a droplet touched the surface, the water that touched the sticky design rebounded much slower than the water that touched the rest of the water-resistant plate. That difference in speed caused the rebounding droplet to spin.

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Normally when a water droplet hits a plain surface, it immediately recoils straight up. But in this case, the drops bounce right or left, or they spiral, depending on the pattern of the plate. Dr. Song and his team have constructed half-moons, pinwheels and one design that resembles a circle divided into three curved lines. By changing the pattern on the plate, the researchers can essentially control the dancing drop’s choreography.