Celebrating the physics of all that flows with Nicole Sharp, Ph.D.
- Profile
Paintball Collisions
In their latest video, the Slow Mo Guys collide paintballs in mid-air, creating some pretty great paint splashes. The high-speed video does a nice job of revealing some of the typical stages a splash goes through. Initially, the paint spreads in a liquid sheet. As it expands and (necessarily) thins, holes form and grow, driving…
Review: “ABCs From Space”
For me, one of the most fun aspects of studying science is seeking out examples of it in the world around us. Adam Voiland – who writes for NASA Earth Observatory, one of FYFD’s favorite sources for excellent fluids in action – takes this a step further with his children’s book “ABCs From Space: A…
Inside Earth’s Core
Without our magnetic field, life as we know it could not exist on Earth. Instead, our atmosphere would be stripped away and the surface would be bombarded by charged particles in the solar wind. Relatively little is known about the dynamo process that governs our magnetic field, though it’s thought to be the result of…
Optimal Swimming
What do trout, sharks, and whales have in common? All are fast swimmers and share remarkable similarities in their swimming dynamics despite different sizes, shapes, and environments. A new study analyzing aquatic locomotion examines the characteristics of these swimmers. The researchers found that a typical parameter for studying swimming fish – the Strouhal number, which…
Hair in the Flow
Humans are hairy on the inside. Not in the way that we are on the outside, but in the sense that many interior surfaces of our bodies are covered in small, flexible, hair-like protrusions like the papillae on our tongues or the cilia in our intestines. Many of these fibers are immersed in fluids, raising…
Pressing Non-Newtonian Fluids
For many fluids, the relationship between force and deformation is not simple. The catch-all name for these materials is non-Newtonian fluids. In a recent episode, the Hydraulic Press Channel did some experiments extruding a couple non-Newtonian fluids: oobleck and a temperature-sensitive putty. What they demonstrated is that a fluid’s response to the forces it experiences…
Fluid Black Holes
Fluid systems can sometimes serve as analogs for other physical phenomena. For example, bouncing droplets can recreate quantum effects and a hydraulic jump can act like a white hole. In this work, a bathtub vortex serves as an analog for a rotating black hole, a system that’s extremely difficult to study under normal circumstances. In…
Surge Flows
Sandy beaches can be a great place to play with neat flows. In a recent video, Frank Howarth describes playing with beach rivers on the Oregon coast and observing a surge flow there. Under the right conditions, a current flowing over sand will build up sand ripples large enough that they form miniature dams in…
Solar Eclipses and Coronal Mass Ejections
Observations of many solar phenomena have only become accessible to humans relatively recently with the advent of satellites. Prior to that, it simply wasn’t feasible to observe dynamics in the sun’s atmosphere, like solar prominences or coronal mass ejections – the sun was simply too bright to see them – except during the occasional total…