There aren’t many naturally occurring plasmas in our daily lives; by far the most common one is lightning. So it’s something of a surprise that a stream of water hitting Keep reading
Month: January 2025
Spinning Paint
Several years ago Fabian Oefner started spinning paint, and it’s been a perennial favorite online ever since. Here the Slow Mo Guys revisit their own paint-spinning antics by super-sizing their Keep reading
Breaking Ground
Pushing a fluid into a porous granular material can fracture it into branching, lightning-like patterns. Here, air is injected into wet grains as a laboratory analog to hydrocarbon extraction or Keep reading
Nestling Droplets
Pay attention after a rainfall, and you may notice beads of water gathering in the corners of a spider’s web or along the leaves of a cypress tree (bottom right). Keep reading
What Makes Joints Pop?
Cracking one’s knuckles produces an unmistakable popping noise that satisfies some and disconcerts others. The question of what exactly causes the popping noise has persisted for more than fifty years. Keep reading
Jupiter’s Belts and Zones
Jupiter’s distinctive bands of colored clouds, known as belts and zones, have been an iconic part of the planet since they were first observed by Galileo. (The scientist, not the Keep reading
Fissures in Africa
Pictures of an enormous fissure in Kenya’s East African Rift Valley have gone viral in recent weeks along with breathless reports about how part of the African continent is splitting Keep reading
How Trees Pull Water
Trees are incredible organisms, and the physics behind them baffled scientists until relatively recently. Inside trees, there is a constant flow of water up from the roots, through the xylem Keep reading
Fly Away!
Spiders are often among the first colonists on newly formed volcanic islands. Thanks to their aerial skills, they are able to travel nearly anywhere by ballooning on strands of their Keep reading
Surfaces That Scrape Off Ice
Ice can be a terrible pest, freezing to surfaces like roads and airplane wings and causing all sorts of havoc. Some surfaces, though, can actually prompt a freezing drop to Keep reading