Celebrating the physics of all that flows with Nicole Sharp, Ph.D.
- Profile
Star Wars Aerodynamics
Science fiction is not always known for hewing to scientific fact, so it will probably come as little surprise that Star Wars’ ships have terrible aerodynamics. But it’s nevertheless fun to see EC Henry’s analysis of drag coefficients of various Rebel and Imperial ships and just how poorly they fare against our own designs. Drag…
Glorious Vortex Street
Satellite imagery often reveals patterns we might struggle to see from the ground. Here Gaudalupe Island off the western coast of Mexico perturbs the atmosphere into a series of vortices. Air flowing across the open ocean gets deflected around and over the rocky, volcanic island, creating a line of vortices that get shed off one…
Calving Icebergs
The birth of icebergs from a glacier is known as calving. Although it’s extremely common for chunks of ice to break off a glacier’s terminus, the process is not well understood. In large calving events like the one shown above, the breakaway is preceded by the formation of a crack or crevasse in the main…
Tea Physics
Tea is a popular beverage around the world, and nearly everyone has their own method for making the perfect cup. Perhaps unsurprisingly, scientists have studied tea physics as well. One such study used both experiments and numerical simulations to study tea infusion from teabags. The authors looked at round, two-dimensional teabags in two configurations –…
360 Fireball
Flames are inherently fascinating to watch. Most of the ones we see regularly, like candle flames and campfires, tend to flicker unsteadily due to their turbulence. But larger fires have a spell-binding nature all their own, one that’s highlighted in slow motion. Here the Slow Mo Guys take flame-gazing to a new level by circling…
The Dangerous Clatter of Dishes
Have you ever noticed how loud dishes are when you’re handling them? Under the right (or, perhaps more accurately, wrong) circumstances, the clatter of ceramics like porcelain can be dangerously loud, as engineer Phil Metzger discovered when repairing his toilet. At one point the lid to his tank slipped from his hands and fell about 20…
Bubble Art
Everyone loves soap bubbles, and bubble artist Melody Yang reveals how to make some pretty awesome ones in this video for Wired. The surface tension of bubbles makes them naturally seek a shape that minimizes their surface area relative to the volume they contain. For a single bubble, that’s a sphere. But once you start…
Collecting Fog
In some parts of the world, fog is a major source of freshwater, but collecting it is a challenge. Most systems use a wire mesh to capture and collect droplets, but the process is highly inefficient, pulling only 1-3% of droplets from the fog. Researchers found that this is due largely to aerodynamic effects. The…
Night Shine
Noctilucent – literally night-shining – clouds are a phenomenon unique to high latitudes during the summer months. Too dim and sparse to see in daylight, these clouds shine at night because their altitude of around 80 km allows them to catch sunlight long after dusk has fallen at the surface. They form when temperatures in…
Sandy Splashes
Sand and other granular materials can be strikingly fluid-like. Here the impact of a solid sphere on sand generates a splash remarkably similar to what’s seen with water. When the ball hits, it creates a crater in the surface and sends up a bowl-like spray of sand. As the ball continues falling through the sand,…