An article by A. M. P. Boelens and M. Muthukumar published in Physical Review E.
The drag in a turbulent flow is significantly reduced in the presence of very small amounts of polymeric additives such as PEO or DNA. This long-standing famous problem of polymer drag reduction has been elusive from a fundamental understanding. Boelens and Muthukumar have proposed a new and universal mechanism based on the coupling between polymer rotation and fluid vortices to explain this phenomenon.