Celebrating the physics of all that flows with Nicole Sharp, Ph.D.
- Profile
Inside a Soap Bubble
Every child learns to blow soap bubbles, but it’s rare that we have a chance to look inside them and see the flow there. In this poster, researchers seed a growing bubble with olive oil droplets, then illuminate them with a laser. This provides a glimpse inside the bubble. In the center, we see the…
Icelandic Glow
Solar wind particles slam into the atmosphere near Earth’s poles, creating billowing curtains of glowing plasma known as auroras. Beneath the earth, molten rock seethes and flows, squeezed up fissures to release explosive gases and spurts of lava to the surface world. These natural phenomena are captured in the left and center of this image,…
Sliding on Fibers
Water drops slide down spiderwebs, along the spines of desert plants, and across the armored exterior of horned lizards. Thin, grooved surfaces like these pop up frequently in nature when organisms need to direct water. A recent study of droplets sliding on fibers suggests why. A drop sliding down a fiber is constantly shrinking, leaving…
Shaking on Impact
When objects impact water with enough speed, they create a smooth-walled, air-filled cavity around and behind them. Here, the impacting object is one with some give, like a spring. The initial impact squishes the object, setting it to oscillating along its length. The result is a wavy cavity. The stiffer the object, the more frequent…
Calming the Waves
Wave action can be a major source of erosion along riverbanks and shorelines. But in a recent study, scientists were able to perfectly absorb incoming waves to create a downstream region with calm, wave-free waters. The group began with a narrow channel that waves could move down. They added two small, side-by-side cavities perpendicular to…
The Best of FYFD 2023
A fresh year means a look back at what was popular last year on FYFD. Usually, I give a numeric list of the top 10 posts, but this year the analytics weren’t as clear. So, instead, I’m combining from a few different sources and presenting an unordered list of some of the site’s most popular…
The Hydrodynamics of Marbling
In marbling, an artist floats paints on a viscosified water bath, using various thin tools to manipulate the final image. Many cultures have developed a version of this art, but for many it will be most recognizable as a technique used to decorate book interiors. In this video, researchers consider the physics behind this beautiful…
Flipping Ice
In nature ice is ever-changing — growing, shrinking, and shifting. This poster illustrates that with a cylinder of ice floating in room temperature water. As the ice melts, it flips over into a new orientation, stays that way for a time, and then shifts again, as seen in the series of blue images. This flipping…
Exoplanet Heating
WASP-96B is a tidally-locked exoplanet between the size of Saturn and Jupiter. This hot, massive planet lies close to its star, orbiting in less than three-and-a-half Earth days. A recent study shows that planets like these can have very different weather, depending on what depth their atmosphere absorbs heat at. Using numerical simulations, researchers took…
Can Explosions Deflect Bullets?
In one of their most Mythbusters-like videos ever, the Slow Mo Guys ask: can an explosion deflect a bullet? To find out, they built out a system to trigger a C4 explosive using a 9mm bullet, all while watching with a series of high-speed cameras. As you’d expect, there are lots of blast waves and…