Experimentalists often need a sense for the overall flow before they can decide where to measure in greater detail. For such situations, flow visualization techniques are a powerful tool since Keep reading
Month: March 2025
Rain-Driven Prey Capture
Pitcher plants often entice their insect victims with sweet nectar before trapping them in inescapable viscoelastic goo. But some species go even further. Nepenthes gracilis, a species native to Southeast Keep reading
Reefs Along New Caledonia
Brown reefs edge a turquoise lagoon in this astronaut snapshot of the New Caledonian coastline. Reefs like these form a natural barrier that protects coastlines from storms by breaking up Keep reading
Stunning Waves
Photographer Lloyd Meudell captures breathtaking images of ocean waves off his home shores of New South Wales. The waveforms and lighting combine to create infinite variety in shape and texture. Keep reading
Absorbing Sound with Moth Wings
Manmade soundproofing tends to be porous and bulky or very limited in the range of frequencies it can handle. In contrast, moths are natural absorbers of ultrasound, having evolved to Keep reading
A Levitated Boil
When acoustically levitated, objects tend to clump together and move like a single, large solid. But researchers found more fluid-like states for their levitated particles when the particles were smaller. Keep reading
Aligning by Bubble Array
Assembling structures from small components is often difficult. Techniques like optical tweezers are limited to very small objects, and magnetic techniques only work with certain materials. Here, researchers use acoustical Keep reading
Perturbations
At first glance, today’s video appears to have little to do with fluid dynamics since it’s a demonstration of interactions between magnets. But for those who’ve delved into the mathematics Keep reading
Liquid Sculptures
Snapshots of splashes are nothing new, but few have mastered the art of freezing incredible shapes in water the way Markus Reugels has. His splash photography is mind-boggling, especially knowing Keep reading
Microscale Kelvin-Helmholtz
When we think of cavitation in a flow, we often think of it occurring at a relatively large scale — on the propeller of a boat, for example. But cavitation Keep reading