Celebrating the physics of all that flows with Nicole Sharp, Ph.D.
- Profile
“Inferno”
Nothing showcases the incredible power of our atmosphere like storms, and no one does stormchase photography like Mike Olbinski. In this vignette, he shows a stunning line of supercells caught near sunset on July 17, 2022. The high shear–combined with the setting sun–put on an incredible show. Dust blown up in a haboob, microbursts and…
Moths Taking Flight
Insect flight is vastly different than the aerodynamics engineers learn around aircraft. That’s particularly apparent looking at these tiny moths taking off and flying in slow motion. Almost every feature seems, at first glance, aerodynamically wasteful. Hairy, scaly surfaces instead of smooth ones? Relatively small wings for their body size? Moths break our engineering intuition.…
Testing Coffee With Current
Coffee is a key ingredient in the scientific process for many researchers, so it’s no wonder that researchers often develop an interest in the drink’s physics and chemistry. In a new study, a research team devised an objective method to test both a coffee’s strength and its roast color. The researchers used a potentiostat to…
NASA Testing Supersonic Rotors for Mars
NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter was the first aircraft humanity has flown on another planet, and engineers are looking to make the next generation of Martian helicopters bigger and more capable. That’s challenging in Mars‘ thin atmosphere, which is only 1% as dense as Earth’s. To get adequate lift, the rotors need to spin faster there. During…
“Stellar Iris”
Artist Thomas Blanchard likes to create wild visuals from a mixture of mundane ingredients like ink, soap, oils, and ferrofluids. In this latest video, he’s mixed chemical reactions and physical phenomena into something reminiscent of a god’s eye staring across time and space, creation and destruction. (Video and image credit: T. Blanchard)
Cloudy Mornings and Clear Evenings
In the past few decades, our knowledge of exoplanets has exploded, but we’re still relatively limited in what we can learn about these worlds. That’s due, in large part, to the indirect way we observe them. Most exoplanets are found when we see them transit, passing between Earth and their star. During a transit, the…
Breaking a Dam to Save It
The concrete that makes up so much of our world is usually local in origin. To keep costs low, engineers use locally-sourced ingredients to make it. But not all ingredients perform the same. In the decades since concrete’s widespread adoption, engineers have discovered that some components in the concrete are prone to chemical reactions that…
Buckling in Rings
From oil drums to–yes–soda cans, liquid-filled cylindrical shells are everywhere. And, it turns out, these structures fail differently than empty shells or ones filled with a solid. Liquid-filled cylinders buckle in sequential rings, as seen in the video below. Researchers found that the buckling resulted from the shell softening and re-stiffening under the compressive load–repeating…
Drying Out Microbe-Filled Droplets
Ocean sprays, coughs, and sneezes are just a few of the ways that droplets full of bacteria and salt can get aloft on a breeze. How do these bacteria stay viable even as their droplet evaporates? That’s the question behind this video’s research. When a bacteria-laden droplet or a salt-laden droplet dries, the evaporating droplet’s…