Ebru is the South West Asian art of painting atop water, similar to suminagashi in Japan or paper marbling in European culture. This video takes you inside the studio of Keep reading
Digging Droplets
A droplet on a surface much hotter than its boiling point will skate on a layer of its own vapor, thanks to the Leidenfrost effect. But if that surface is, Keep reading
Flexible Filament Reduces Drag
Most shapes aren’t streamlined for fluid flow. We call these bulky, often boxy shapes, bluff bodies. Above, we see two examples of a bluff body, a flat plate, in a Keep reading
Ventilation and Respiratory Disease
In 1977, one passenger with the flu infected 38 people onboard a flight with malfunctioning ventilation. In this video, Dianna digs into the physics of respiratory disease transmission and just Keep reading
Sundews Weaponize Viscoelasticity
In nutrient-poor soils, carnivorous plants like the cape sundew supplement their diets by eating insects. To entice their prey, the cape sundew secretes droplets of sugary water. But unwary insects Keep reading
Ferrofluid Snakes
We’re used to seeing ferrofluids — with their suspended iron nanoparticles — as spiky fluids when exposed to a magnetic field. But this is not always the case. Here, the Keep reading
Ultrasound in Medicine
When you hear the term “ultrasound,” your brain likely jumps to grainy black and white images of unborn babies, but this technology has a lot more medical uses than just Keep reading
Branching Gels
If you sandwich a viscous fluid between two plates, then pull the plates apart, you’ll often get a complex branching pattern that forms as air pushes its way into the Keep reading
Event: Machine Learning in Mechanics
This Thursday, August 27th, the U.S. National Committee on Theoretical and Applied Mechanics is holding a special free webinar series on Machine Learning in Mechanics. Details for each talk and Keep reading
Speeding Sedimentation
Did you know that particles settle faster in an inclined container instead of a vertical one? This sedimentation phenomenon is known as the Boycott effect, after the researcher who first Keep reading