Celebrating the physics of all that flows with Nicole Sharp, Ph.D.
- Profile
Settling in Straws
At some point in your life, you’ve probably stuck your finger over the end of a straw and used it to pick up the liquid you’re drinking. If you lift the straw so that the end is still in your drink and remove your finger from the top, the liquid level in the straw will…
Oobleck Under Impact
Fluids like air and water are Newtonian, which means that the way they deform does not depend on how the force on them gets applied. Many other fluids, however, are non-Newtonian. How they behave depends on how force is applied to them. The Internet’s favorite non-Newtonian fluid is probably oobleck, a mixture of cornstarch and…
Making Champagne for Space
Humanity’s ongoing quest to enjoy beloved beverages in space has a new entry: champagne. French champagne maker Mumm has announced a new line with specially designed bottles to dispense champagne in microgravity. The bottles feature an internal piston that allows users to release the contents from the bottle in a controlled manner. Rather than pouring…
Supernumerary Bows
After the rain of Hurricane Florence came the rainbow, or rainbows, in this case. Photographer John Entwistle captured this image of a rainbow with several additional supernumerary bows. The inner fringes seen here form when light passes through water droplets that are all close to the same size; given the spread seen here, the droplets…
Flying on Flexible Wings
Bats are incredible and rather unique among today’s fliers. Like birds, they flap to produce their lift and thrust, but where birds have relatively stiff wings, a bat’s wings are flexible. The thin webbing of skin stretched between the bat’s finger joints has muscles inside it that fire as the mammal flaps. This means that…
Inside Avalanches
Avalanches have traditionally been difficult to model and predict because of their complex nature. In the case of a slab avalanche, the sort often triggered by a lone skier or hiker, there is a layer of dense, cohesive snow atop a layer of weaker, porous snow. The presence of the skier can destabilize that inner…
The Livers of Our Rivers
To the naked eye, mussels and other bivalves don’t appear to be doing much. But these filter feeders are hard at work. The mussel takes in water through its incurrent siphon (on the right side in this image), and tiny cilia move the water through its gills, which filter out plankton and other edibles. Wastewater…
Merging Black Holes
At the heart of many galaxies, including our own, lies a supermassive black hole millions of times the mass of our sun. Scientists have yet to observe the merger of two such black holes, but using simulations, they are trying to learn what such collisions might look like. Simulations like the one shown here require…
The Actual Shape of Raindrops
If you imagine the shape of a raindrop, you probably think of a tear drop shape, but the reality of rain is much more complicated. It’s Okay to Be Smart has a great primer on the subject that takes a look at the forces on a raindrop and shows you the actual shape they take,…
Kelly Slater’s Surf Ranch
Many of us who grew up visiting water parks instead of ocean beaches have spent time bobbing in a wave pool. They’ve been around for decades. But a new generation of wave pools are aiming for a different goal: the perfect surf wave. One of the foremost current facilities is Kelly Slater’s Surf Ranch, shown…