Celebrating the physics of all that flows with Nicole Sharp, Ph.D.
- Profile
“Water in Dripping”
Zheng Lu’s stainless steel sculptures capture elaborate splashes in action. In some of the pieces, thousands of Chinese characters cover the sculpture’s surface; these are quotes from historical texts and poems, an homage to early Chinese philosophers who studied the principles of the natural world. See more examples of the artist’s work here. (Image credit:…
Hawaiian Magma Complex
Few volcanoes are as well-studied as those of the Big Island of Hawai’i. With a host of seismic monitors and frequent eruptions, scientists know the near-surface region of Hawai’i well. But a recent study looked at nearly 200,000 seismic events after the 2018 collapse of Kilauea’s crater and found hints of what goes on much…
Finding the Red in the Red Tide
Blooms of the algae Karenia brevis — known as a red tide — bring havoc to Gulf Coast shores. The algae can kill fish and other marine life, and it causes skin irritation and even respiratory problems for humans. But in spite of the moniker, these algae can be hard to spot; they can add…
Hunting By Whisker
Seals and sea lions often hunt fish in waters too dark or turbid to rely on eyesight. Instead, they follow their whiskers, using the turbulence generated by a fish’s wake. The vortices shed by the fish cause the seal’s whiskers to vibrate, giving them sensory information. To better understand what a seal can derive from…
Can Water Solve a Maze?
Inspired by a simulation, Steve Mould asks a great question in this video: can water solve a maze? Yes — with some caveats. Steve makes two different maze patterns — a simple and a complex path — in two different sizes. With the small, simple-path version, the water immediately follows the correct path without taking…
Runescapes
Drying fluids can leave behind all kinds of fascinating patterns, as we’ve seen before with whiskey, coffee, and even blood. Here researchers study patterns left behind by lipids, dyes, and other fluids. They place their mixture in a rotating flask kept in a warm bath. For a few hours, the fluids mix, chemically react, and…
A Toad’s Sticky Saliva
Frogs and toads shoot out their tongues to capture and envelop their prey in a fraction of a second. They owe their success in this area to two features: the squishiness of their tongues and the stickiness of their saliva. The super squishy toad tongue deforms to touch as much of the insect as possible.…
Long-Lived Bubbles
Without surfactants to stabilize them, bubbles don’t last long at room temperature. But adding a little heat changes the picture. When heated, the bubbles get stabilized by a thermal gradient that lifts fluid toward the bubble’s peak, where it cools and gathers. Eventually, the cold fluid grows heavy enough to sink down the side of…
Swimming With Corkscrews
For many microswimmers, like bacteria or spermatozoa, swimming through common fluids is like moving through mud. Unless they can produce enough thrust to overcome a fluid’s yield-stress, they are effectively stuck in a solid. A recent study breaks down exactly what a microswimmer has to manage, assuming they use a helical, corkscrew-like tail for propulsion.…
Abel Prize Winner Luis Caffarelli
Tomorrow mathematician Luis Caffarelli will receive the Abel Prize — one of the highest honors in mathematics — in part for his work in fluid dynamics. Caffarelli is one of the authors of a partial proof of regularity for the Navier-Stokes equations, the equations governing fluid motion. A full proof of regularity and smoothness —…