Celebrating the physics of all that flows with Nicole Sharp, Ph.D.
- Profile
Flying Foxes
A sweltering day in India brought out the local giant fruit bats (also called Indian flying foxes) to keep cool in the river. Normally nocturnal, they made a rare daytime appearance to beat the heat. Wildlife photographer Hardik Shelat was lucky enough to catch these awesome images of the bats in flight. True to their…
Martian Streaks Are Dry
Dark lines appearing on Martian slopes have triggered theories of flowing water or brine on the planet’s surface. But a new study suggests that these features are, instead, dry. To explore these streaks, the team assembled a global database of sightings and correlated their map with other known quantities, like temperature, wind speed, and rock…
Listening for Pollinators
Can plants recognize the sound of their pollinators? That’s the question behind this recently presented acoustic research. As bees and other pollinators hover, land, and take-off, their bodies buzz in distinctive ways. Researchers recorded these subtle sounds from a Rhodanthidium sticticum bee and played them back to snapdragons, which rely on that insect. They found that…
Rolling Down Soft Surfaces
Place a rigid ball on a hard vertical surface, and it will free fall. Stick a liquid drop there, and it will slide down. But researchers discovered that with a soft sphere and a soft surface, it’s possible to roll down a vertical wall. The effect requires just the right level of squishiness for both…
Seeing the Sun’s South Pole For the First Time
The ESA-led Solar Orbiter recently used a Venus flyby to lift itself out of the ecliptic — the equatorial plane of the Sun where Earth sits. This maneuver offers us the first-ever glimpse of the Sun’s south pole, a region that’s not visible from the ecliptic plane. A close-up view of plasma rising off the…
“Now I See – The Collection Vol. 2”
In the next video of his current collection, Roman De Giuli takes us flying over liquid landscapes that look like our Earth in miniature. Many of them have the feeling of river deltas or glaciers. Sharp-eyed viewers will notice bubbles and flotsam in some of these streams. If you follow them, you can see how…
Predicting Yield
We’ve all experienced the frustration of ketchup refusing to leave the bottle or toothpaste that shoots out suddenly. These materials are yield stress fluids, which transition from solid-like behavior to liquid flow once the right amount of force is applied. A new study suggests that — despite their wide range of characteristics — these fluids…
Evaporating Off Butterfly Scales
This award-winning macro video shows scattered water droplets evaporating off a butterfly‘s wing. At first glance, it’s hard to see any motion outside of the camera’s sweep, but if you focus on one drop at a time, you’ll see them shrinking. For most of their lifetime, these tiny drops are nearly spherical; that’s due to…
Io’s Missing Magma Ocean
In the late 1970s, scientists conjectured that Io was likely a volcanic world, heated by tidal forces from Jupiter that squeeze it along its elliptical orbit. Only months later, images from Voyager 1’s flyby confirmed the moon’s volcanism. Magnetometer data from Galileo’s later flyby suggested that tidal heating had created a shallow magma ocean that…
“Droplet on a Plucked Wire”
What happens to a droplet hanging on a wire when the wire gets plucked? That’s the fundamental question behind this video, which shows the effects of wire speed, viscosity, and viscoelasticity on a drop’s detachment. With lovely high-speed video and close-up views, you get to appreciate even subtle differences between each drop. Capillary waves, viscoelastic…