Celebrating the physics of all that flows with Nicole Sharp, Ph.D.
- Profile
Milano Cortina 2026: How Ski Skins Work
The 2026 Olympics include the debut of ski mountaineering (a.k.a. skimo), a sprint race heading both up and down the mountain on skis. During the uphill segment of the race, competitors use skins on their skis to help them climb; these skins then get ripped off (see below) before skiing back down. As their name…
Milano Cortina 2026: Cortina Sliding Center
This year’s sliding events–bobsleigh, luge, and skeleton–will take place at the brand-new Cortina Sliding Center. Built on the site of a historic sliding track, this new venue came together in only the last couple of years. It features a state-of-the-art refrigeration system that pumps a mixture of water and ethylene glycol beneath the track surface…
Milano Cortina 2026: Curling Stones
Ailsa Craig sits about 10 miles off the Scottish coast, a granite dome left behind by a volcanic event millions of years ago. This small, now-uninhabited crag is the birthplace for every Olympic curling stone. It’s where Kays of Scotland, which has made curling stones for the Olympics since the sport appeared in the first…
Milano Cortina 2026: Ice’s Many Forms
Welcome to another Olympic year and another FYFD celebration of the fluid physics that enable these sports! All Winter Olympic sports are required, per the IOC, to take place on snow or ice–one of the strangest substances we know of. Despite consisting of two simple elements–hydrogen and oxygen–water manages to find a shocking number of…
“Cracked Earth”
Branching cracks wend through the slopes of Utah in this photograph by Matt Payne. It may seem strange to feature something so dry on a blog about fluid dynamics, but everything seen here depends as much on air and water as on soil, rock, and sand. How water intrudes into the porous landscape and the…
Gliding Like a Grasshopper
Many biorobots are built after flies and bees–insects that rely heavily on flapping flight. For small robots, this means carrying heavy batteries or remaining tethered in order to power their motors. Instead, researchers have turned to grasshoppers for a lesson in small-scale gliding. Grasshoppers have two sets of wings. The forward set provide protection and…
Instabilities in a Particle Flow
Even though particles are not (strictly speaking) a fluid, they often behave like one. Here, researchers investigate what happens when two layers of particles–with different size and density–slide down an incline together. The video is tilted so that the flow instead appears from left to right. When the larger, denser particles sit atop a layer…
Watching Waves on the Nanoscale
It’s tough to simulate nonlinear wave dynamics, so scientists often test theories in wave flumes, where they can create more controlled waves than what we see in the wild. But conventional wave flumes are big–meters-long, complicated equipment–and can only test a small range of conditions. To reach more extreme nonlinear dynamics, researchers have turned to…
A Supernova in Motion
In 1604, astronomers first caught sight of Kepler’s Supernova Remnant, a massive explosion some 17,000 light-years away. Twenty-five years of observations from the Chandra X-ray Observatory went into making this timelapse, which shows the supernova remnant‘s material pushing into the surrounding gas and dust. In its fastest regions, the supernova remnant is moving around 2%…
Caught in a Spider’s Web
Grains of pollen are caught amid droplets on a spider’s web in this award-winning image by John-Oliver Dum. How droplets behave on fibers has been a popular topic in recent years with research on how droplets nestle into corners, how they slide on straight or twisted wires, the patterns formed by streams of falling drops,…