Celebrating the physics of all that flows with Nicole Sharp, Ph.D.
- Profile
Superwalking Droplets
When placed on a vibrating oil bath, droplets have many wild behaviors, some of which mirror quantum mechanics. Even big droplets — bigger than 2 millimeters in diameter — can get in on the fun. This video shows several of these “jumbo superwalkers” in action, both singly and in groups. (Video and image credit: Y.…
“Glacial River Blues”
Glacier-fed rivers are often rich in colorful sediments. Here, photographer Jan Erik Waider shows us Iceland’s glacial rivers flowing primarily in shades of blue. While the wave action and diffraction in these videos is great, the real star is the turbulent mixing where turbid and clearer waters meet. Watch those boundaries, and you’ll see shear…
Marangoni Effect in Biology
For decades, biologists have focused on genetics as the key determiner for biological processes, but genetic signals alone do not explain every process. Instead, researchers are beginning to see an interplay between genetics and mechanics as key to what goes on in living bodies. For example, scientists have long tried to unravel how an undifferentiated…
How the Edenville Dam Failed
Back in May 2020, the Edenville Dam in Michigan failed dramatically, releasing flood waters that destroyed a downstream dam and caused millions of dollars of damage. In this Practical Engineering video, Grady deconstructs the accident, based on an interim report from the forensic team charged with investigating the failure. Along the way, he explains common…
Inside Solidification
As children, we’re taught that there are three distinct phases of matter–solid, liquid, and gas–but the reality is somewhat more complicated. In the right–often exotic–conditions, there are far more phases matter takes on. In a recent study, researchers described a metal that sits somewhere between a liquid and a solid. In a liquid, atoms are…
Event-Based Recording
High-speed cameras are an amazing tool in fluid dynamics, but they come with a whole host of challenges. The camera and lighting have to be positioned to deal with reflections, the data sets are enormous, and post-processing all that data takes a long time. Here, researchers experiment instead with studying a flow using an event-based…
“Rivers and Dunes”
Taken from a Cessna aircraft, photographer J. Fritz Rumpf’s image of a Brazilian landscape appears abstract. But it captures a serpentine river and surrounding dunes, dyed brown by decaying plant matter and sculpted by the forces of wind and current. This shot is part of a portfolio that won him the title of 2025 International…
The Best of FYFD 2025
Happy 2026! This will be a big year for me. I’ll be finishing up and turning in the manuscript for my first book — which flows between cutting edge research, scientists’ stories, and the societal impacts of fluid physics. It’s a culmination of 15 years of FYFD, rendered into narrative. I’m so excited to share…
The Hydrostatic Paradox
Engineering classes often discuss hydrostatics–the physics of non-moving water–before they cover fluid dynamics and its flows. But hydrostatics is plenty challenging on its own, as Steve Mould demonstrates in this video looking at how hydrostatic pressure depends on depth (and, not, as our intuition might suggest, on shape). As always, he has some nice countertop-scale…
Lung Flows
When a fluid coats the inner walls of a cylinder, it can move downward in what’s called a collar flow. In our airways, a sinking collar flow can thicken as it falls, eventually blocking the airway completely. In a Newtonian fluid, this thickening during motion is essentially unavoidable; any small disturbance to the fluid will…