My brother-in-law (and collaborator) Stephen Morris is a prof in the Physics Department at U of T. He and his student Mike Rogers studied a particular auto-catalytic chemical reaction that produces buoyant plumes. The interplay between the chemistry and the fluid flow leads to interesting dynamics, which you can read about here:
http://focus.aps.org/story/v26/st23
But there is an interesting side story. When Stephen was writing this paper a year ago, he discovered that one of his earlier papers on the subject had been cited in a paper about supernovae. It turns out that you get buoyant plumes at the beginning of Type IA supernovae, too, except that the reactions involved are nuclear, not chemical, and the whole thing is over in microseconds rather than hours. So, Stephen put a line in his paper to the effect that their chemical plumes might serve as a laboratory analog for the plumes involved in the detonation of Type IA supernovae. Apparently science writers troll through the arXive preprint site looking for cool stuff to write about. Some of them came across Stephen’s paper and went wild. He is now famous for having created a “supernova in a jar.” Here’s a video:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tedVybfxSI?wmode=transparent]
