Earth Unplugged has posted some great high-speed footage of a peregrine falcon and a raven in flight. Notice how both birds draw their wings inward and back on the upstroke. Keep reading
Month: April 2025
101 Signals
Welcome, Wired readers! I’m stunned, honored, and very grateful to see FYFD featured on this year’s 101 Signals science recommendations, especially given how much I admire many of the others on Keep reading
Vibrating Droplets
When still, water drops sitting on a surface are roughly hemispherical, drawn into that shape by surface tension. But on a vibrating surface, the same water drop displays many different Keep reading
Elastic Walls and Viscous Fingers
The Saffman-Taylor instability, characterized by the branchlike fingers formed when a less viscous fluid is injected into a more viscous one, is typically demonstrated between two rigid walls, as in Keep reading
Granular Gases
Vibrating particles or granular materials can produce many fluid-like behaviors. In this video, researchers demonstrate how a granular gas made up of particles of two sizes behaves at different conditions. Keep reading
Rebounding Off Dry Ice
Droplet rebound is frequently associated with superhydrophobic surfaces but can also be generated by very large temperature differences. For very hot substrates, a thin layer of the drop vaporizes on Keep reading
Navigating the Interface
Walking on water may be the stuff of legend at human scales, but it’s a fact of everyday life for many smaller species. Waxy, hydrophobic coatings typically make such insects’ Keep reading
Fluids Round-up – 11 August 2013
Time for another fluids round-up! Here are your links: Back in January 1919, a five-story-high metal tank full of molasses broke and released a wave of viscous non-Newtonian fluid through Keep reading
Contaminants Flowing Uphill
Here’s an example of some baffling fluid dynamics. Researchers have found that, when pouring a fluid from one container into a lower one containing a fluid with floating particulates, it’s Keep reading
Convection on the Sun
New photographs showing ultra-fine structure in the sun’s chromosphere and photosphere have been released. They offer a fascinating view into the magnetohydrodynamics of the sun, where the fluid behaviors of Keep reading