Celebrating the physics of all that flows with Nicole Sharp, Ph.D.
- Profile
Liquid Metal Printing
Engineers have developed a new 3D-printing technique that uses molten aluminum to quickly manufacture large-scale parts. This Liquid Metal Printing method deposits the metal into a bed of tiny glass beads, which hold the metal in place while it cools. In minutes, they can produce furniture-sized parts, but that speed comes at a cost in…
Moths in Flight
Moths and butterflies are such unique fliers among insects. Compared to their bodies, their wings are often enormous. High-speed video reveals the complex motions of their wing strokes. Some species have wings that flex dramatically, bringing sections of the opposite wing close enough to clap together. Other species, like the plume moth, have porous wings…
“Spitting Out Water Babies”
When Tomasz Wilk settled to camp one evening on the banks of a Polish river, he didn’t expect to find fountains in the shallows. Though reminiscent of an archer fish’s shot, this stream comes from a freshwater mussel. In spring, the mature female thick-shelled river mussels head to the shallows, where they edge a bit…
Open Call for the Traveling Gallery of Fluid Motion
This year’s Traveling Gallery of Fluid Motion will be hosted in Salt Lake City. There’s currently an open call to scientists and artists for submissions inspired by Leonardo Da Vinci. From the organizer: This particular exhibition aims to showcase the historical interplay between art and science, with Da Vinci serving as a guiding luminary whose…
Serpents and Ouroboros
Beads of condensation on a cooling, oil-slicked surface have a dance all their own in this video. Large droplets gobble up their fellows as they follow serpentine paths; each new droplet donates its interfacial energy to feed the larger drop’s kinetic energy. Eventually, the big drops switch to a circular path, like an ouroboros, the…
Swirls Off South Australia
Summer winds along Australia’s Bonney Coast push coastal waters offshore, triggering the upwelling of colder waters from depths below 300 meters. These cold waters from the deep are nutrient-rich, thanks to all the decomposition that happens along the ocean floor. The infusion of nutrients triggers an explosion of life, visible here in the form of…
Skittering Drops
Drip some ethanol on a hot surface, and you’d expect it to spread into a thin layer and evaporate. But that doesn’t always happen, and a recent study looks at why. Ethanol is what’s known as a volatile liquid, meaning that it evaporates easily at room temperatures, well below its boiling point. When dropped on…
Rough Surfaces
In fluid dynamics, we’re often concerned with flow moving past a solid surface — air past an airplane wing, water past fish scales, oil between moving parts — and those surfaces are rarely perfectly smooth. Rough surfaces affect the flow near them, sometimes in unexpected ways. Here, researchers show a rough surface’s effect on the…
“Perfect Sky”
It’s all blue skies in Roman De Giuli’s short film, “Perfect Sky.” Created with paint, ink, and glitter on paper, it’s a relaxing piece of fluid art. Put on your headphones, take a deep breath, and plunge in. You’ll see lots of gorgeous Marangoni effects, some low Reynolds number mixing, and various instabilities. (Video and…
The Unusual Auroras of Mars
Earth, Saturn, and Jupiter have auroras at their poles, generated by the interaction of their global magnetic fields with the solar wind. Mars has no global magnetic field, only remnants of one frozen into areas of its crust; yet it, too, has auroras. Mars’s auroras are rarer and discrete. They occur most often over the…