If you hold a bubbly beverage like champagne or soda near your face, you’ll feel a light mist of tiny, nearly invisible droplets.These droplets form when bubbles reach the surface Keep reading
Month: January 2025
Swimming, Cycling, and Sailing
Summer brings with it lots of great sports, and whether you love riding a bike, sailing a boat, or just hanging out at the pool, our latest FYFD/JFM video has Keep reading
“Le Temps”
Thomas Blanchard is back with another beautiful music video. This one features ink cascading over various shapes underwater. Lots of tiny mushroom-shaped Rayleigh-Taylor instabilities here caused by the ink’s greater Keep reading
Convection Without Heat
We typically think of convection in terms of temperature differences, but the real driver is density. In the animations above, cream sitting atop a liqueur is undergoing solutal convection – Keep reading
A Viscous Splash
The splash of a drop may be commonplace, but it is still a mesmerizing and fertile phenomenon. When it comes to splashing, scientists are still learning how to predict the Keep reading
The Kaye Effect
Allow a stream of shampoo to fall into a pile and you’ll catch a glimpse of the bizarre Kaye effect. A jet of shampoo will briefly rise up before becoming Keep reading
When Sound Makes You Vertiginous
For some people, a musical tone is enough to induce vertigo and feelings of being drunk. These individuals often have a small hole or defect in the bone that surrounds Keep reading
Breaking With a Wave
For rocket combustion and other applications, like watering your lawn with a hose, a stream of fluid may need to be broken up into droplets. While simply spraying a liquid Keep reading
Folding Fluids
Highly viscous liquids – like cake batter, lava, or the spider silk above – fold as they fall. Several factors impact this instability including the fluid’s density, viscosity, surface tension, Keep reading
Forming Europa’s Bands
Jupiter’s icy moons, Europa and Ganymede, are home to subsurface oceans. These moons also experience strong tidal forces from their parent planet and sibling moons that squeeze and deform them Keep reading