This year’s Nikon Small World in Motion competition was won by fluid dynamics! The first place video shows droplets on a superhydrophobic surface coalescing. The droplets are a mixture of Keep reading
Colorful Kelvin-Helmholtz Clouds
Like breaking waves at the beach, these wavy clouds curl but only for a moment. The photo was captured near sunset on a late August evening in Arlington, MA. This Keep reading
Making a Miniature River
Despite wide differences in ecology and geology, rivers around the world share certain fundamental features. Physicists study these characteristics by creating small-scale rivers in the laboratory, like the experiment featured Keep reading
Understanding Stars’ Seismology
Our understanding of Earth’s interior is based mostly on observations of seismic waves, which travel differently through our rocky crust and the molten core. Scientists similarly use seismic waves in Keep reading
Spinning Bubbles
Fluid dynamics is largely about figuring out the relationship between forces. For a soap bubble sitting still, that’s primarily the effect of gravity, which makes the fluid in the soap film drain downward, and Keep reading
Storm Eyes and Mushrooms in a Drop
In industry, drying droplets often have many components: a liquid solvent, solid nanoparticles, and dissolved polymers. The concentration of that last component — the polymers — can have a big Keep reading
Granular Fingers
Finger-like shapes often form on fluids injected between glass plates, but what happens when that injected fluid contains particles? That’s the situation in this recent study, where researchers sandwiched a Keep reading
Freshwater Mussels
Freshwater bivalves like these California floater mussels are critical species for the health of our waters. And although we don’t think of mussels as being very mobile, they’re actually quite Keep reading
Recreating Infinity
In the ocean, tiny organisms can migrate hundreds of meters through the water column. Recreating and tracking those journeys in a lab is quite a challenge, but it’s one the Keep reading
Leidenfrost on Water
When a skillet is hot enough, water droplets will skitter across the surface almost frictionlessly thanks to the Leidenfrost effect. The incredibly high temperature of the surface relative the the liquid’s Keep reading