Inspired by the film Oppenheimer, artist Thomas Blanchard created “Trinity,” a short film imagining a nuclear explosion with macro-scale fluid motion. There’s clever video editing and compositing in this video, but Keep reading
Month: May 2025
Baseball’s Mysterious Rubbing Mud
Since 1938, every ball in Major League Baseball has been covered in a special “rubbing mud” harvested from a secret location in New Jersey. Although the league has tried in Keep reading
How Sunflowers Follow the Sun
Sunflower blossoms face east, presenting their blooms to the morning sun and the bees that come exploring with it. But before they grow their massive flower, each plant spends the Keep reading
Cooking Perfect Cacio e Pepe
In cooking, sometimes the simplest recipes are the toughest to master. Cacio e pepe — a classic three-ingredient Italian pasta — is an excellent example. Made properly, the sauce of Keep reading
Bubbly Tornadoes Aspin
Rotating flows are full of delightful surprises. Here, the folks at the UCLA SpinLab demonstrate the power a little buoyancy has to liven up a flow. Their backdrop is a Keep reading
“One”
A 4-minute, unedited one-shot video of colorful paint sliding down a sheet? Yes, please. Beautiful visuals aside, there are some really interesting physics involved here. It’s unclear whether the there’s Keep reading
Visualizing Unstable Flames
Inside a combustion chamber, temperature fluctuations can cause sound waves that also disrupt the flow, in turn. This is called a thermoacoustic instability. In this video, researchers explore this process Keep reading
Why Nature Loves Fractals
Trees, blood vessels, and rivers all follow branching patterns that make their pieces look very similar to their whole. We call this repeating, self-similar shape a fractal, and this Be Keep reading
Predicting Landslide Speeds
Knowing what speed a landslide will reach helps us predict how much damage they can cause. That speed depends on many factors: the steepness of the terrain, the sliding distance, Keep reading
“Kirigami Sun”
Kirigami is a variation of origami in which paper can be cut as well as folded. Here, researchers look at flow through a cut kirigami sheet and how that flow Keep reading