Celebrating the physics of all that flows with Nicole Sharp, Ph.D.
- Profile
Chains of Salps
Salps are small, jellyfish-like marine invertebrates that swim by ejecting a pulsatile jet. They are unusual creatures whose lives have two major stages: one in which salps swim individually and one in which they link together and swim in large chains. In the chain, salps don’t synchronize their jetting; each salp jets with its own…
Chinese Spouting Bowl Physics
In their newest video, the Slow Mo Guys recreated one of my favorite effects: vibration-driven droplet ejection. For this, they use a Chinese spouting bowl, which has handles that the player rubs after partially filling the bowl with water. By rubbing, a user excites a vibrational mode in the bowl. Watch the GIFs above and…
Wrinkling Drops
When a viscous drop falls into a pool of a less viscous liquid, the drop can deform into some beautiful and complex shapes. Typically, shear forces between the drop and its surroundings cause a vortex ring to roll up and advect downward, thereby stretching the remainder of the drop into thin sheets that can buckle…
When Fire Ants are a Fluid
Substances don’t have to be a liquid or a gas to behave like a fluid. Swarms of fire ants display viscoelastic properties, meaning they can act like both a liquid and a solid. Like a spring, a ball of fire ants is elastic, bouncing back after being squished (top image). But the group can also…
Songs in Soap
There are many beautiful ways to visualize sound and music – Chris Stanford’s fantastic “Cymatics” music video comes to mind – but this is one I haven’t seen. This visualization uses a soap film on the end of an open tube with music playing from the other end. You can see the set-up here. The…
Flowing Ice
Glaciers are kind of bizarre. Despite being very solid, they still flow, sometimes on the order of a meter a day. This flow is driven by gravity and the incredible weight of the dense ice. Near the base of the glacier, the pressure is great enough to cause some localized melting. (Very high pressures actually…
Squishy Impacts
How spheres impact water has been studied for more than a century. The typical impact for a rigid sphere creates a cavity like the one on the upper left – relatively narrow and prone to pinching off at its skinny waist. If the sphere is elastic –squishy – instead, the cavity ends up looking much…
Flying Fragments
Flying fragments can be a big danger in explosions. Shown above are two shadowgraph images of 1 gram explosives originally packed in solid containers. Each explosion produced a visible spherical shock wave, about 1 meter across in both pictures. On the left side, the container has fragmented into large pieces, each of which travels near…
The Mantis Shrimp’s Left Hook
The mantis shrimp is a tiny, clown-colored juggernaut of underwater physics. Some species have modified claws that serve as clubs for punching their prey, and the mantis shrimp swings that club fast – its acceleration is comparable to a bullet’s! Moving that quickly in water causes a drastic drop in local pressure, low enough to…
Vortex Reconnection
In slow motion, vortex rings can be truly stunning. This video shows two bubble rings underwater as they interact with one another. Upon approach, the two low-pressure vortex cores link up in what’s known as vortex reconnection. Note how the vortex rings split and reconnect in two places – not one. According to Helmholtz’s second…