What do you get when you combine liquid gallium, a blender, and a special probe lens? Some pretty wild slow-mo video of a liquid metal vortex, courtesy of the Slow Mo Guys. This video is almost as notable for its set-up as it is for the high-speed footage, given the lengths Gav and Dan go to in order to get the shot! (Image and video credit: The Slow Mo Guys)
Ice giant Neptune orbits our sun once every 165 years, meaning that each season on the planet lasts about 41 years here on Earth. Currently, the side of Neptune facing us is entering early summer, but a recent survey of atmospheric measurements show that Neptune’s stratosphere is experiencing some unexpected changes. Between 2003 and 2018, the team found that global stratospheric temperatures actually decreased by 8 degrees Celsius. Even more dramatically, Neptune’s southern pole warmed by a full 11 degrees Celsius between 2018 and 2020. Both results hint that atmospheric patterns on the planet may be far more complex than current models assume. (Image credit: NASA/JPL; research credit: M. Roman et al.; via Physics World)
Fire ants clump together into giant rafts to stay alive during floods. But these rafts won’t form with just any number of ants. Researchers found that individual ants will actually kick one another away. It’s not until there are about ten ants that the raft formation becomes stable. In this video, the team lays out their experiments and models for fire ant rafting, showing that capillary action helps draw the raft together and individual ants’ activity can destabilize rafts if they’re too small. (Image and video credit: H. Ko and D. Hu)