Celebrating the physics of all that flows with Nicole Sharp, Ph.D.
- Profile
“Emergence”
Artist Susi Sie explores fluidic worlds through her macro lens. In “Emergence,” her focus is on ferrofluids immersed in other liquids. Beginning with tiny droplets traversing the thin fluid channels of a foam, she allows the unique qualities of ferrofluids to slowly take center stage. Dark blobs grow into curvy labyrinths as a magnetic fields come into play. Until ultimately the…
Escaping the Limits of Viscosity
For large creatures, it’s not hard to feel the evidence of someone else swimming nearby. But to tiny swimmers water is incredibly viscous and hard to move. These creatures have to swim very differently than their larger cousins, and evidence of their motion dies out quickly. But at least one microorganism, Spirostomum ambiguum, has discovered a method for overcoming…
Why Do Backwards Wings Exist?
Over the years, there have been many odd airplane designs, but one you probably haven’t seen much is the forward-swept wing. While most early aircraft featured straight wings, rear-swept wings are fairly common today, especially among commercial airliners. A rear-swept wing has its forward-most point at the root of the ring, where it attaches to the…
Diamond-Shaped Waves
Strong winds blowing across Lake Michigan created this diamond-shaped wave pattern after the incoming waves reflected off the breakwater on the right. The formal name for these waves are clapotis gaufré, meaning “waffled standing waves”. As seen in the animation above, the waves aren’t perfect standing waves; otherwise they would stay in one place rather than propagating…
Arctic Swirls
These colorful swirls show sediment and organic matter carried into the Arctic Ocean. Like dyes or tracer particles in a lab experiment, this run-off reveals the complicated patterns of mixing where freshwater and salt water mix. Delicate as they appear, these eddies are tens of kilometers across. Zoom in on the full resolution image to really appreciate…
If You Teach a Goose to Fly
Scientists do all manner of odd things in the name of science. To teach bar-headed geese – birds capable of flying at the altitude of Everest – to fly in a wind tunnel, one group of researchers fostered a group of geese from the moment they hatched. They taught them to fly, first by chasing…
What Controls an Avalanche?
In an avalanche, grains spontaneously flow when a slope reaches a critical angle, and they continue flowing until they settle at a new, lower angle. Scientists have long debated why this angle mismatch occurs, and, in recent years, the general opinion was that the avalanche’s inertia kept it flowing long enough to settle at a lower…
Waves in the Sky
Even when the sky is mostly blue, there’s a lot going on at different altitudes. The winds do not move in a consistent direction or at the same speed, something which becomes apparent when watching clouds move relative to one another. When different layers of air move past one another, there is shear between them, not unlike…
The Impressive Take-Off of Pigeons
One reason that peregrine falcons are such amazing fliers is that their prey, pigeons, are no slouches in flight, either. Able to take off vertically and accelerate to 100 kph in two seconds, pigeons are pint-sized powerhouses. With this high-speed video, BBC Earth highlights the mechanics of this vertical take-off. Pigeons begin by bending their legs and…