Colorful chandeliers, passing spirits, sprouting mushrooms, and fountains of falling ink appear in Christopher Dormoy’s “Aquakosmos.” Driven by the slight density difference between ink and water, many of these elaborate Keep reading
Month: September 2024
Stopping a Bottle’s Bounce
A few years ago, the Internet was abuzz with water bottle flips. Experimentalists are still looking at how they can arrest a partially fluid-filled container’s bounce, but now they’re rotating Keep reading
Mitigating Urban Floods
For densely-populated urban areas, floods are one of the most damaging and expensive natural disasters. We can’t control the amount of rain that falls, so engineers need other ways to Keep reading
Weathering Spilled Oil
As long as we continue to extract and transport oil, marine oil spills will continue to be a problem. Recent work shows that spilled oil weathers differently depending on both Keep reading
Rolling Over Wisconsin
Although they may look sinister, roll clouds like this one are no tornado. These unusual clouds form near advancing cold fronts when downdrafts cause warm, moist air to rise, cool Keep reading
Diving From Above
Blue-footed boobies, like many other seabirds, climb to a particular altitude before folding their wings and diving head-first into the water. This acrobatic feat balances the bird’s force of impact Keep reading
Butterfly Scales
Catch a butterfly, and you’ll notice a dust-like residue left behind on your fingers. These are tiny scales from the butterfly’s wing. Under a microscope, those scales overlap like shingles Keep reading
Fishing With Mucus
The scaled wormsnail isn’t much for travel. It lives its whole life cemented to a rock in the tidal lands. And when you can’t go out for food, you have Keep reading
Drag Is Greatest Before Submersion
A new study shows that partially submerged objects can experience more drag than fully submerged ones. This unexpected result comes from the excess fluid that piles up ahead of the Keep reading
Hitting Molten Steel
Watching droplets burst is often fascinating, but it’s rare that we get to watch droplets of molten metal. In this Slow Mo Guys video, though, they’re shattering globs of molten Keep reading