Blooms of the algae Karenia brevis — known as a red tide — bring havoc to Gulf Coast shores. The algae can kill fish and other marine life, and it Keep reading
Month: April 2025
Hunting By Whisker
Seals and sea lions often hunt fish in waters too dark or turbid to rely on eyesight. Instead, they follow their whiskers, using the turbulence generated by a fish’s wake. Keep reading
Can Water Solve a Maze?
Inspired by a simulation, Steve Mould asks a great question in this video: can water solve a maze? Yes — with some caveats. Steve makes two different maze patterns — Keep reading
Runescapes
Drying fluids can leave behind all kinds of fascinating patterns, as we’ve seen before with whiskey, coffee, and even blood. Here researchers study patterns left behind by lipids, dyes, and Keep reading
A Toad’s Sticky Saliva
Frogs and toads shoot out their tongues to capture and envelop their prey in a fraction of a second. They owe their success in this area to two features: the Keep reading
Long-Lived Bubbles
Without surfactants to stabilize them, bubbles don’t last long at room temperature. But adding a little heat changes the picture. When heated, the bubbles get stabilized by a thermal gradient Keep reading
Swimming With Corkscrews
For many microswimmers, like bacteria or spermatozoa, swimming through common fluids is like moving through mud. Unless they can produce enough thrust to overcome a fluid’s yield-stress, they are effectively Keep reading
Abel Prize Winner Luis Caffarelli
Tomorrow mathematician Luis Caffarelli will receive the Abel Prize — one of the highest honors in mathematics — in part for his work in fluid dynamics. Caffarelli is one of Keep reading
“Fusion of Helios”
Built from approximately 90,000 individual images, “Fusion of Helios” reveals the wisp-like corona of our Sun. Astrophotographers Andrew McCarthy and Jason Guenzel joined forces to combine eclipse images with data Keep reading
Oil-Covered Bubbles Popping
When bubbles burst, they release smaller droplets from the jet that rebounds upward. Depending on their size, these droplets can fall back down or get lofted upward on air currents Keep reading