Earth, Saturn, and Jupiter have auroras at their poles, generated by the interaction of their global magnetic fields with the solar wind. Mars has no global magnetic field, only remnants Keep reading
Month: September 2024
Tracking Break-Up
In fluid dynamics, researchers are often challenged with complicated, messy flows. With so much going on at once, it’s hard to work out a way to keep track of it Keep reading
Eel-Like Swimming
Working with living creatures can’t always reveal their mechanics. That’s one reason engineers like building biorobots. Here, researchers built 1-guilla, an eel-like swimmer, and studied how its body motions affected Keep reading
Shredding Gold
While vacuums can do pretty wild things to liquids, the title of this Slow Mo Guys video is a bit misleading. They’re not so much exploding gold in a vacuum Keep reading
“-37F Winter in Yellowstone”
Yellowstone National Park is always fascinating and surreal, but especially so in winter when volcanically-heated geysers and springs meet frigid, snowy weather. This short film from Drew Simms shows the Keep reading
Feynman’s Sprinkler Solved
In graduate school, my advisor introduced us to a particularly vexing fluid dynamical thought experiment known as the Feynman sprinkler. After observing an S-shaped sprinkler that rotated when water shot Keep reading
Seeding Clouds
In the remote South Atlantic, north of the Antarctic Circle, sit the volcanic Zavodovski and Visokoi islands. Though only roughly 500 and 1000 meters tall, respectively, each island disrupts the Keep reading
Stretching Ant Rafts
In their natural habitat, fire ants experience frequent floods and so developed the ability to form rafts. Entire colonies will float out a flood in a two-ant-thick raft anchored to Keep reading
Spreading Frost
Condensation forms beads of water on a surface. When suddenly cooled, those drops begin to freeze into frost. This video looks at the process in optical and in infrared, revealing Keep reading
Variations on a Theme by Edgerton
In the 1930s, Harold Edgerton used strobed lighting to capture moments too fast for the human eye, including his famous “Milk-Drop Coronet”. Recreating his set-up is far easier today, thanks Keep reading