A drone’s noisiness is one of its major downfalls. Standard drones are obnoxiously loud and disruptive for both humans and animals, one reason that they’re not allowed in many places. Keep reading
Month: April 2025
Filtering Like a Manta Ray
As manta rays swim, they’re constantly doing two important — but not necessarily compatible — things: getting oxygen to breathe and collecting plankton to eat. That requires some expert filtering Keep reading
Climate Change and the Equatorial Cold Tongue
A cold region of Pacific waters stretches westward along the equator from the coast of Ecuador. Known as the equatorial cold tongue, this region exists because trade winds push surface Keep reading
Ghostly Waterfalls
Photographer Jonathan Knight likes capturing waterfalls about 45 minutes after sunset, creating ghostly images that emphasize the shape of the cascading water. The dim surroundings and misty shapes remind me Keep reading
Hot Droplets Bounce
In the Leidenfrost effect, room-temperature droplets bounce and skitter off a surface much hotter than the drop’s boiling point. With those droplets, a layer of vapor cushions them and insulates Keep reading
Drops on the Edge
Drops impacting a dry hydrophilic surface flatten into a film. Drops that impact a wet film throw up a crown-shaped splash. But what happens when a drop hits the edge Keep reading
Bifurcating Waterways
Your typical river has a single water basin and drains along a river or two on its way to the sea. But there are a handful of rivers and lakes Keep reading
Playful Martian Dust Devils
The Martian atmosphere lacks the density to support tornado storm systems, but vortices are nevertheless a frequent occurrence. As sun-warmed gases rise, neighboring air rushes in, bringing with it any Keep reading
“Dispersion”
In “Dispersion,” particles spread under the influence of an unseen fluid. Like Roman de Giuli’s work, filmmaker Susi Sie creates macro images that look like ice floes, deserts, and river Keep reading
Inside an Alien Atmosphere
Studying the physics of planetary atmospheres is challenging, not least because we only have a handful of examples to work from in our own solar system. So it’s exciting that Keep reading