Hi, folks! As the social media landscape fractured, I’ve been dragging my feet about making some needed changes. But no longer. As of November 2024, I am no longer updating Keep reading
Tracking Coastal Sediment Loss
Shorelines rely on an influx of sediment to counter what’s lost to erosion by waves and currents. But tracking that sediment flux is challenging in coastal regions where salt, waves, Keep reading
Cavitation Near Soft Surfaces
Collapsing cavitation bubbles are sometimes used to break up kidney stones, and they may find other uses in medicine as well. Here, researchers investigate the collapse of laser-triggered cavitation bubbles Keep reading
Strata of Starlings
Starlings come together in groups of up to thousands of birds for the protection of numbers. These flocks form spellbinding, undulating masses known as murmurations, where the movement of individual Keep reading
Tracking Tonga’s Boom
When the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano erupted in January 2022, its effects were felt — and heard — thousands of kilometers away. A new study analyzes crowdsourced data (largely from Keep reading
How Cooling Towers Work
Power plants (and other industrial settings) often need to cool water to control plant temperatures. This usually requires cooling towers like the iconic curved towers seen at nuclear power plants. Keep reading
A New Mantle Viscosity Shift
The rough picture of Earth’s interior — a crust, mantle, and core — is well-known, but the details of its inner structure are more difficult to pin down. A recent Keep reading
Jets, Shocks, and a Windblown Cavity
As material collapses onto a protostar, these young stars often form stellar jets that point outward along their axis of rotation. Made up of plasma, these jets shoot into the Keep reading
“Flowing Kelp”
This CUPOTY-shortlisted photo by Sigfrido Zimmerman shows giant kelp drifting in the current. At the base of each blade is an inflated bladder that helps keep the algae buoyant. The Keep reading
Holding Steady
Before a mammalian cell divides, the spindle — a protein structure — divides the cell’s genetic material in two. As it does, the cytoplasm inside the cell forms a toroidal Keep reading
The Best of FYFD 2024
Welcome to another year and another look back at FYFD’s most popular posts. (You can find previous editions, too, for 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, and Keep reading