Celebrating the physics of all that flows with Nicole Sharp, Ph.D.
- Profile
Jovian Auroras
Like Earth, Jupiter is home to polar auroras that light the sky as charged particles interact with the planet’s magnetosphere. A recent paper identifies interesting features in the aurora that appear similar to expanding vortex rings (see inset below). Although the researchers cannot yet identify the origin of the rings, they hypothesize that the process…
Inside the Blockage of the Suez Canal
In March 2021, the world watched as the Ever Given container ship got stuck in the Suez Canal, disrupting global shipping for more than a week. In this Practical Engineering video, Grady delves into some of the phenomena that may have played a role in the incident of the ship that launched a thousand memes.…
Flying Spiders Use Electric Fields
Many species of spider fly with a technique calling ballooning. We’ve touched on spider flight before, but more recent research adds a new dimension to the phenomenon. Researchers showed that spiders can actually use electrical fields in their flight. When isolated from flow or outside electrical fields, researchers found that spiders would still begin ballooning…
“The Golden Sutra”
“The Golden Sutra” is an homage to the colors of Buddhism, specifically the Longzangjing scripture illustrated in yellow, red, green, blue, and white with letters of gold. Artist Roman De Giuli captures some incredible fluid eddies and streaks with ink, paint, and glitter on paper. (Image and video credit: R. De Giuli)
Seeing Through
Often researchers are interested in flows around and between objects, but seeing those flows is a challenge in a crowded field of view. One useful trick for this problem is matching the refractive index of your objects and the fluid they’re immersed in. Here we see the glass beads in a container seemingly disappear when…
Airborne Aerosol Transmission of COVID-19
Early in the COVID-19 pandemic health officials resisted the idea that the novel coronavirus was transmissible through tiny aerosol droplets rather than larger, non-buoyant droplets. One case that made headlines and helped shift opinion was that of an outbreak among patrons of a Guangzhou restaurant traced to a single, pre-symptomatic patient zero. The pattern of…
Reader Question: Kinetic Sand
An inquiring reader wants to know: How does kinetic sand work to make it flow like a liquid? Thanks! – 3 Year Olds Everywhere I confess I don’t have any firsthand experience with Kinetic Sand, but it certainly looks fun. It’s a colorful, moldable sand toy that holds together far better than your typical pile…
Wind Turbine Efficiency
Wind turbines face a paradoxical challenge: they must extract the wind’s kinetic energy while still allowing the air to pass. In this Minute Physics video, Henry gives a crash course on wind turbine efficiency, based on the restrictions of conservation of mass and conservation of energy. When the two are combined, they show that an…
Metallic Magma
Metallic paint flows like silver lava in this macro video from Chemical Bouillon. The paint has been mixed with an unknown fluid (my guess is alcohol) to produce the flows we see here. My suspicion is that we’re seeing solutal convection where variations in surface tension create convective flow within the liquid. What do you…
Oil-Coated Bubbles
Bubbles in industrial applications are often more complicated than a simple pocket of air surrounded by water. Here researchers investigate the formation of an air bubble coated in oil before it rises through water. The photo above shows a series of snapshots as the bubble forms. Initially, a droplet of oil sits pinned on the…