This heart-shaped atmospheric apparition is a lenticular cloud captured over the mountains of New Zealand. As you can see in the companion video, the cloud itself remains stationary over the Keep reading
Month: October 2020
Four Seasons
The team behind Beauty of Science decided to explore the four seasons in this video combining macro footage of crystal growth, chemical reactions, and fluid dynamics. It’s always a fun Keep reading
Self-Wrapping Drops
A liquid drop can fold itself up in a thin sheet. The animation above shows a drop of water with an ultra-thin (79nm) circular sheet of polystyrene atop it. As Keep reading
Microgravity Can Change Vision
In recent years, astronauts have reported their vision changing as a result of long-duration spaceflight. Pre- and post-flight studies of astronauts’ eyes showed flattening along the backside of the eyeball, Keep reading
Swimming with Corkscrews
E. coli, like many bacteria, swim using corkscrew-like appendages called flagella. Because the bacteria are extremely tiny – their flagella may be less than ten microns long – their swimming Keep reading
Unboiling an Egg
Cooking is something we think of as a one-way process. You add heat to food, it changes forms, and there’s undoing that. But that process is less one-directional than we Keep reading
Soft Robots
A research group at MIT has created a new class of fast-acting, soft robots from hydrogels. The robots are activated by pumping water in or out of hollow, interlocking chambers; Keep reading
Jupiter’s Little Red Spot
The Juno mission has been revealing angles of Jupiter we’ve never seen before. This photo shows Jupiter’s northern temperate latitudes and NN-LRS-1, a.k.a. the Little Red Spot (lower left), the Keep reading
The Archer Fish’s Arrow
Archer fish have a remarkable superpower. When hunting, they target insects above the water and knock them down with a precision strike from a jet of water they spit out. Keep reading
Freezing Impact
When a water droplet hits a frozen surface, what happens depends significantly on the temperature of the substrate. At relatively high temperatures (-20 degrees C), the droplet freezes without any Keep reading