Celebrating the physics of all that flows with Nicole Sharp, Ph.D.
- Profile
To Clog or Not to Clog?
The clear plastic disks use to study clogging appear rather plain — at least until you look at them through polarizers. Then the disks light up with a web of lines that reveal the unseen forces between the particles. In this video, researchers use this trick to explore how spontaneous clogs occur. If particles jam…
“Vorticity 5”
Photographer and stormchaser extraordinaire Mike Olbinski is back with the fifth volume in his “Vorticity” series. Shot over the 2022 and 2023 tornado seasons in the U.S. Central Plains, this edition has virtually everything: supercells, microbursts, lightning, tornadoes, and haboobs. There’s towering convection and churning, swirling turbulence. It’s a spectacular look at the power and…
Forming Zigzags
Scientists are fascinated by the organized patterns that can emerge from non-living systems. Here, researchers study micron-sized magnetic particles, immersed in a viscoelastic fluid and subjected to an oscillating magnetic field. The peanut-shaped particles roll around their long axis and assemble to form millimeter-sized bands of zigzags. These patterns, the researchers found, do not depend…
Painting in Sediment
Pale plumes of sediment flow off these islands in the Gulf of Mannar between India and Sri Lanka. As waves erode the land, currents and tides carry the sediment outward, shaping it into swirls and eddies. I rarely tire of satellite images like these because there are always subtle new details of flow to notice.…
Uranus’s Polar Cyclone
Uranus is an oddity among the planets of our solar system. Where other planets spin around an axis roughly in line with their orbital axis, Uranus spins on its side, placing its poles in line with the sun. On Earth, the polar regions are naturally colder the equator, but that doesn’t hold true for Uranus.…
The Destructive Power of a Blank
Removing the slug does not make a bullet harmless, as the Slow Mo Guys demonstrate in this video. They’re shooting blanks — casings that still contain propellant but no projectile. There’s still more than enough force to obliterate an egg, lunch meat, and water balloons. You really don’t want one of these fired near you.…
Antarctic Icebergs
Antarctica is nearly fully covered in ice and doubles in surface area each winter as the surrounding sea freezes. So it’s an especially spectacular place for viewing icebergs, like these photographed by Jan Erik Waider. The ice comes in many shapes — some clearly fractured and some sculpted by wind and water. The colors, too,…
Fish Fins Work Together
Researchers studying how fish swim have long focused on their tail fins and the flows created there. But a fish’s other fins have important effects, too, as seen in this recent study. Researchers built a CFD simulation based on observations of a swimming rainbow trout, focusing on the flow from its back and tail fins.…
Relax With Hummingbirds
Quick, agile, and fierce, the hummingbird is an amazing creature. Small for a bird but much larger than an insect, it’s able to hover in place and eat nectar directly from flowers. Many species use a forked tongue with curled edges that help it capture the sweet, viscous fluid. Even their distinctive sounds are fluid-influenced,…
Gravity Changes Droplet Shapes
With small droplets, gravity usually has little effect compared to surface tension. An evaporating water droplet holds its spherical shape as it evaporates. But the story is different when you add proteins to the droplet, as seen in this recent study. As a protein-doped droplet sitting on a surface evaporates, it starts out spherical, like…