Celebrating the physics of all that flows with Nicole Sharp, Ph.D.
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The Best of FYFD 2020
2020 was certainly a strange year, and I confess that I mostly want to congratulate all of us for making it through and then look forward to a better, happier, healthier 2021. But for tradition and posterity’s sake, here were your top FYFD posts of 2020: Juvenile catfish collectively convect for protection Gliding birds get…
Vanishing Spirits: Aging
The necessary ingredients for scotch whisky’s evaporation patterns are alcohol, surfactants, and polymers; some of those components are absorbed during the spirit’s aging in oak casks. Photographer Ernie Button explored how long it takes for whisky to absorb enough of these chemicals by photographing the stains left by samples aged between 1 and 5 weeks…
Vanishing Spirits: Rice-Based Whisky
In yesterday’s post, photographer Ernie Button showed us that barrel-aged gin can leave behind an evaporation pattern remarkably similar to scotch whisky. But even among whiskys not every spirit uses the same grains. Here we see patterns left behind by a 10-year-aged, rice-based whisky. The stains are entirely different than those of (barley-based) scotch. The…
Vanishing Spirits: Gin
Photographer Ernie Button has spent years exploring the patterns left by evaporating scotch. A team of researchers found that the uniformity of scotch whisky’s stain requires three ingredients: alcohol to drive concentration gradients, surfactants to pull particulates away from the drop’s edge, and polymers to help stick particles to the glass. Button wondered whether other…
Rocket Yeast
Usually, microbial colonies are grown on a solid substrate, but what happens when they grow on a liquid surface? That’s the question explored in this Gallery of Fluid Motion video featuring colonies of brewer’s yeast on various liquid substrates. When the viscosity of the liquid is low enough, the colony actually gets pulled apart (Image…
Dengue Dengue Dengue
Musical duo Dengue Dengue Dengue create live audio/visual performances with fluid dynamics. Their visuals are created by adding various liquids and dyes atop an illuminated background. To add extra dynamism, they sometimes use a sheet of plastic to cover and pump the liquids, creating a pseudo-Hele-Shaw cell where they can trigger fluid instabilities in time…
Recreating Acoustics
The cultural heritage of a site is made up of more than its appearance; its soundscape is vital, as well. Acousticians and historians work together to preserve and recreate the auditory landscape of important sites through acoustical measurements and digital reconstructions based on architecture and building materials. Thanks to projects like these, researchers can achieve…
Aging Fluids
If you’ve ever left a sealed container of Playdoh untouched for months, you know that there’s a big difference between the fresh stuff and what’s left in that can. Aging can have big effects on non-Newtonian fluids. In this video, we see drops of a synthetic clay impacting at different speeds. In the top row…
Hammerhead Hydrodynamics
Hammerhead sharks have some of the most distinctive craniums in the ocean, which begs the question: how do they swim with that head? New computational fluid dynamics studies suggest that their long foil-shaped heads help the sharks maneuver swiftly, but they come at the cost of substantially higher drag. The researchers found that drag on…
Rolling Off a Duck’s Back
Ducks and other water fowl need protection from the elements. Fortunately for them, the structure of their feathers cleverly helps them shed water. As seen in this video, feathers have tiny hooks, called barbicels, that act like Velcro, zipping the individual barbs of a feather together to keep water out. When birds preen, they’re using…