Ouzo is an aperitif made up of ethanol (alcohol), water, and anise oil. This three-part, or ternary, mixture undergoes an intriguing evaporation process thanks to the characteristics of its components. Keep reading
Month: October 2024
Crisscrossing Clouds
This natural-color satellite image shows crisscrossing cloud patterns off coastal Africa. These distinctive lines in the sky are gravity waves, and they form when air masses get displaced upward by Keep reading
Crash Course Fluids
Crash Course Physics returns to the subject of fluids with their video on fluid dynamics. They stick with ideal fluids (i.e. incompressible, inviscid, laminar flows) for simplicity and cover some Keep reading
Dust Devils
Dust devils, like fire tornadoes and waterspouts, form from warm, rising air. As the sun heats the ground to temperatures hotter than the surrounding atmosphere, hot air will begin to Keep reading
Martian Ripples
Earth and Mars both feature fields of giant sand dunes. The huge dunes are shaped by the wind and miniature avalanches of sand, and their surface is marked by small Keep reading
These Invertibrates May Help Robots Swim
New FYFD video! Learn all about salps, vortex rings, and underwater robots. Thanasi Athanassiadis takes me inside his lab and his newly published research into how proximity affects the thrust Keep reading
Quarry Smashing
Despite appearances, this is not a crashing ocean wave. In fact, it’s a planned explosion at a quarry, and that wave is more than 360,000 tons of rock and 68 Keep reading
The Knuckleball
For more than a century, athletes have used the zigzagging path of a knuckleball to confound their opponents. Knuckleballing is best known in baseball but appears also in volleyball, soccer, Keep reading
Granular Plugs
Imagine filling a narrow tube with a mixture of water and tiny glass beads. Then take a syringe and very slowly start drawing out the water. As the water gets Keep reading
“Vorticity”
Photographer Mike Olbinski is back with another storm-chasing timelapse entitled “Vorticity”. Like his previous work, this film is a breath-taking example of physics in action. It is well worth taking a Keep reading