Giant honeybees live in huge open nests. To protect themselves, they’ve developed a mesmerizing wave-like defense known as shimmering. When shimmering, the bees in a hive, beginning from a distinct Keep reading
Month: April 2025
Collective Motion: Crowds
It’s sometimes taken for granted that, in groups, people can behave a lot like a fluid or a granular material. This allows scientists to adapt models developed for those materials Keep reading
Collective Motion: Worms
Although most animals are more solid than fluid, what happens when you put many of them together can be strikingly fluidic. Above you see the black aquatic worm, Lumbriculus variegatus, Keep reading
Collective Motion: Intro
Herds, flocks, schools, and even crowds can behave in fluid-like ways. On Science Friday, Stanford professor Nicholas Ouellette explains some of the physics behind these similarities. Fluids are, after all, Keep reading
Avoiding Ice
Keeping ice from forming on a surface is a major engineering challenge. Typically, there’s no controlling certain factors – like the size and impact speed of droplets – so engineers Keep reading
Simulating Solar Flares
Few topics in fluid dynamics are more mathematically complicated than magnetohydrodynamics – the marriage between electromagnetism and fluids. That mathematical complexity, along with the vast range of scales necessary to Keep reading
Liquid Antispiral
Spiral formations are common in nature, from galaxies to chemical reactions. But most examples in nature rotate such that their arms trail the direction of rotation. Viewed side-on, this makes Keep reading
Worthington and His Jets
If you’ve been around fluid mechanics for very long, you’ve probably noticed that we like to name things after people. (Mostly dead, white guys, but that’s another subject.) Whenever someone Keep reading
The Polar Vortex
Every year or two, the Northern Hemisphere gets treated to a bout of intensely cold temperatures thanks to the polar vortex. What you may not realize, though, is that it’s Keep reading
Dripping Down the Rivulet
If you’ve ever watched water running down the side of the street, you’ve probably noticed that it doesn’t flow smoothly. Instead, you’ll see waves, rivulets, and disturbances that form. That’s Keep reading