Celebrating the physics of all that flows with Nicole Sharp, Ph.D.
- Profile
A Dandelion-Like Supernova Remnant
In 1181 CE, astronomers in China and Japan recorded a new, short-lived star in the constellation Cassiopeia. After burning for nearly six months, this historic supernova disappeared from the naked eye. It was only in 2013 that an amateur astronomer identified a nebula in the vicinity of that supernova, and, in the years since, astronomers…
Lines of Ice Eddies
In February 2024, the North Atlantic’s sea ice reached its furthest extent of the season, limning the coastline with tens of kilometers of ice. These images — both capturing the Labrador coast on the same day — show the swirling patterns marking the wispy edges of ice field. In this region, the ice is likely…
Running Out of Sand?
Headlines over the past few years have suggested that the world is running out of sand — specifically, that we’re running out of the angular sand grains preferred for concrete. Grady breaks down this idea in this Practical Engineering video, showing that the issue is more complicated than the shape of a sand grain. Yes,…
“Alive Painting”
Artist Akiko Nakayama’s intuitive grasp of fluid dynamics is so good that she manipulates liquids live to musical accompaniment. Her dendritic paintings — made from a combination of acrylic paint and isopropyl alcohol — inspired scientific research papers. There’s no substitute, I’m sure, for seeing her art live, but you can get a taste of…
How Magnetic Fields Shape Core Flows
The Earth’s inner core is a hot, solid iron-rich alloy surrounded by a cooler, liquid outer core. The convection and rotation in this outer core creates our magnetic fields, but those magnetic fields can, in turn, affect the liquid metal flowing inside the Earth. Most of our models for these planetary flows are simplified —…
The Taum Sauk Dam Failure and Its Legacy
Managing an electrical grid is all about balancing the electricity that plants can supply with the instantaneous demands of consumers. If there’s more power available than people need, it needs to get stored somehow. And for decades, the best way to store that excess supply has been in hydroelectric reservoirs like at the Taum Sauk…
Ember Bursts Spread Wildfires
In a wildfire, a burst of embers lofted upward can travel far, starting a new spot fire when they land. Although large ember bursts only happen occasionally, researchers found that these events — with orders of magnitude more embers than usual — play an outsized role in wildfire spread. In their experiments, researchers observed a…
Convection in Blue
Convection cells like these are all around us — in the clouds, on the Sun, and in our pans — but we rarely get to watch them in action. Convection results from densities differing in different areas of a fluid. Under gravity’s influence, having a dense fluid over a lighter one is unstable; the dense…
Ice Without Gravity
Astronaut Don Pettit is back in space, and that means lots of awesome microgravity experiments. Here, he grew thin wafers of ice in microgravity in a -95 degree Celsius freezer. Then he took the ice wafers and photographed them between crossed polarizers, creating this colorful image. The colors highlight different crystal orientations within the ice…