One of the tried and true cooking tips my mother gave me when I was younger was to test the temperature of my griddle before making pancakes by splashing a Keep reading
Month: December 2023
Drops Through Drops
The splashes from droplets impacting jets create truly mesmerizing liquid sculptures. Corrie White is one of the masters of this type of high-speed macro photography. Her work captures the instantaneous Keep reading
Reversing a Flow
The reversibility of laminar mixing often comes as a surprise to observers accustomed to the experience of being unable to separate two fluids after they’ve been combined. As you can Keep reading
The Floating Water Bridge
The interaction of electric fields and fluids can lead to some unexpected results. Here we see the formation of a water bridge formed between two beakers of demineralized water across Keep reading
Mackerel vs. Eel: Who Swam It Better?
Which matters more, form or function? This simulation sets out to answer that question by comparing the swimming motion of eels and mackerels. Eels have longer, more rounded body shapes Keep reading
Flying Squid
Ever seen a squid fly? Not many have, but the behavior may be more common than you think. Thanks to a set of photos from an amateur photographer, scientists have Keep reading
Where Jupiter Got Its Swirls
When layers of a fluid are moving at different relative velocities, they shear against one another. This shear can trigger the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability, which develops as a waves along the Keep reading
The Gobbling Drop
A little polymer goes a long way when it comes to changing a fluid’s behavior. Normally, a falling jet of fluid will develop waviness and be driven by surface tension Keep reading
Solar Tornadoes
NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory captured this video of swirls of darker, cooler plasma caught between competing magnetic forces over the course of 30 hours. The plasma strands rotate like tornadoes Keep reading
Making Mixed Emulsions
Ever tried to mix oil and vinegar? Anyone who has ever dealt with salad dressings knows the difficulty of evenly distributing immiscible fluids; the key is to shake them and Keep reading