Celebrating the physics of all that flows with Nicole Sharp, Ph.D.
- Profile
Reader Question: Blood Jets
Reader shoebill-san asks: are blood jets realistic? when someone gets shot in the movies? This one’s a bit tough to boil down to a yes or a no, honestly. While piercing an artery can cause jetting (more on that below), movies tend to exaggerate the effect. And even among Hollywood movies, there’s a broad variation in…
Reversing Time
Waves contain lots of information. They are also time invariant, which means that they will behave the same regardless of whether time moves forward or backward. This isn’t a property we observe often in life since time just moves forward for us. But a new experiment has demonstrated a method of wave control that can,…
Crash Course Hydrostatics
Crash Course Physics has just put out an episode on fluids at rest (a.k.a. hydrostatics). For those who are unfamiliar, Crash Course is an educational YouTube channel that offers fun, instructional videos on a large and ever-growing array of topics. In this video, they tackle a lot of important basics for fluids, including the principles…
Amphibious Adaptation
Every year newts move to the water in the springtime to mate before returning to land for the rest of the year. This annual aquatic relocation is accompanied by changes in the newt’s body. Flaps of skin grow from their upper jaw to their lower jaw, partially closing their mouths at the corners. This can…
“Memories of Paintings”
In “Memories of Paintings,” Thomas Blanchard gives us an up-close view of fluids and mixing. It’s a calming and curious video made from combinations of paint, oil, oat milk, and soap. The fluids feather and intertwine, driven by differences in surface tension. Paint gets encapsulated by immiscible oil to create little islands of color that…
Turbulence in the Solar Wind
One of the key features of turbulent flows is that they contain many different length scales. Look at the plume from an erupting volcano, and you’ll see eddies that are hundreds of meters across as well as tiny ones on the order of millimeters. This enormous difference in scale is one of the major challenges…
Flamethrowing
Humans have long been fascinated by staring into flames, and the Slow Mo Guys carry on the grand tradition here with 4K, high-speed video of a flamethrower. Like firebreathers, a flamethrower’s fire is the result of a spray of tiny, volatile droplets of fuel. Once ignited, the spray becomes a turbulent jet of flames. Turbulent…
Arriving at Jupiter
Today all eyes turn to Jupiter where NASA’s Juno spacecraft will enter orbit around the gas giant. In preparation, Hubble and ground-based telescopes have been observing Jupiter in both the visible (upper right) and infrared (upper left) spectrum. The lower image shows a 1:5 scale model of Juno and a full-size replica of one of…
Easy Squeezing
Nearly everyone has struggled with the frustration of trying to get ketchup, toothpaste, or peanut butter out of a container. These fluids and fluid-like substances are notoriously difficult to budge because they prefer to wet and adhere to solid surfaces. One way to limit this adhesion is to use a superhydrophobic surface, like the one…