Celebrating the physics of all that flows with Nicole Sharp, Ph.D.
- Profile
Dolphins Playing With Bubble Rings
Blow a jet of air underwater and you can make a bubble ring. It takes some practice for humans, or you can use a device. In this video, a team introduced wild dolphins to a bubble-ring-making machine and observed how the dolphins reacted. After some initial wariness, the animals played with them for hours, creating…
Bird Photographer of the Year 2022
Try as we might, humans cannot understand fluid dynamics as birds do. Whether they are primarily flyers or swimmers, birds have an innate understanding of lift and other aerodynamic forces that put the best engineers to shame. Shown here are a subset of winners from the 2022 Bird Photographer of the Year competition, each of…
Anoles Revisited
Longtime readers may recall seeing this little bubble-crowned anole previously. This species dives underwater to escape predators and will breathe and rebreathe a bubble of air for as much as 18 minutes before resurfacing. At the time of my original post, I speculated that the reptile’s hydrophobic skin might provide a large enough bubble surface…
Dune Fields From Space
An astronaut captured this image of the Oyyl Dune Field in Kazakhstan from the International Space Station. To the south and east of the dune field (right and lower parts of image) there are fluvial floodplains, sources of sediment that feed the dunes. With sufficient wind and sand sources, the dune field has grown in…
Dance of the Coral Polyps
Coral reefs are made of up small organisms, called coral polyps, that live together in a colony. Individual polyps can expand, contract, and wave in the flow around them, and, in a recent study, researchers looked at whether changing conditions in temperature and light wavelength can affect polyp movement. To do so, they built a…
Backswimmers
Backswimmers rule the surface of ponds, streams, and other bodies of water. These insects spend much of their time clinging just beneath the air-water interface, where they hunt larvae and other insects. They use oversized, oar-shaped back legs to row, and they breathe using an air bubble that clings to their abdomen like a personal…
“Haut”
In Susi Sie’s “Haut” the camera seems to fly over ever-shifting landscapes. In reality, these are macro images, created (I think) by dyes and patterns atop a water bath. But they look like vistas we could find on Earth or Mars — giant dune fields, calving glaciers, and river-divided canyons. For something similar in color,…
Optimizing Wind Farms Collectively
In a typical wind farm, each wind turbine aligns itself to the local wind direction. In an ideal world where every turbine was completely independent, this would maximize the power produced. But with changing wind directions and many turbines, it’s inevitable that upstream wind turbines will interfere with the flow their downstream neighbors see. So,…
Cloud Streets
Parallel lines of cumulus clouds stream over the Labrador Sea in this satellite image. These cloud streets are formed when cold, dry winds blow across comparatively warm waters. As the air warms and moistens over the open water, it rises until it hits a temperature inversion, which forces it to roll to the side, forming…
Predicting Alien Ice
Europa is an ocean world trapped beneath an ice shell tens of kilometers thick. To better understand what we might find in those oceans, researchers turn to analogs here on Earth, looking at Antarctica’s ice shelves. Beneath those shelves, ice forms via two mechanisms: the first, congelation ice, freezes directly onto the existing ice-water interface.…