FYFD

Category: Art

  • Featured Video Play Icon

    Mammatus Clouds

    Mammatus clouds are a relatively rare and dramatic variety. One advantage of living in Colorado is that I see them somewhat often, especially during our stormy springs and summers. This video by Mike Olbinski features a dramatic skyscape of mammatus clouds (here in Colorado, natch) at sunset.

    Although they’re often associated with stormy weather, there’s no widely accepted theory as to how mammatus clouds form. Their lobe-like protrusions form from cold, sinking air, but this is about as far as theories agree. It’s even unclear what their relation to extreme weather may be since these short-lived cloud formations can appear around, before, or even after such weather. (Image and video credit: M. Olbinski)

  • Featured Video Play Icon

    “As Above”

    In Roman Hill’s “As Above,” we see expansive celestial landscapes: nebulae, the corona of a star, and expanding interstellar dust clouds. Except, in reality, we are watching fluids undergoing a chemical reaction, on a canvas only 8 square millimeters in size. It’s a fun — and beautiful — reminder that the patterns of physics repeat across many scales. (Video and image credit: R. Hill)

  • Marangoni Bursting

    Marangoni Bursting

    Placing a mixture of alcohol and water atop a pool of oil creates a stunning effect that pulls droplets apart. The action is driven by the Marangoni effect, where variations in surface tension (caused in this case by the relative evaporation rates of alcohol and water) create flow. David Naylor captures some great stills of the flow, including the only example of a double burst I’ve seen so far. For more on the science behind the effect, check out this previous post or the original research paper. (Image credit: D. Naylor; see also this previous post)

  • Seeping Sculptures

    Seeping Sculptures

    Drips, blobs, and squishes – that’s how artist Dan Lam describes her recent series of sculptures. The pieces are a mix of polyurethane foam, resin, and acrylic, decorated in bold gradients of neon color. I love the fluidity of each piece, as well as the decorative piping of spikes on many of them. (As a matter of fact, they remind me of this work.) Check out more of Lam’s work on her website and Instagram feed. (Image credit: D. Lam; via Colossal)

  • Featured Video Play Icon

    “Focus, Vol. 2”

    This short film from photographer Roman De Giuli focuses on ethereal and abstract fluids. What you’re watching is primarily paint, with a little in the way of flow additives. There’s lovely marbling and some impressively sharp edges, but mostly you can just sit back and enjoy the flow! (Image and video credit: R. De Giuli)

  • Featured Video Play Icon

    Building Ferrofluid Sculptures

    Eric Mesplé is an artist, but he’s also a blacksmith, welder, programmer, engineer, and innovator. Many of his sculptures feature ferrofluids, magnetic liquid whose movement is driven by electromagnets Mesplé designs and builds himself. In this video from Wired, we get a behind-the-scenes look at some of his work, and to me, one of the big takeaways is just how clearly science, engineering, and technology are married to art in Mesplé’s work. I imagine this is true of many of today’s artists! (Video credit: Wired)

  • Featured Video Play Icon

    A Year From Geostationary Orbit

    Our planet is a complex fluid dynamical system, and one of the best ways to watch nature at work is through timelapse. This short film takes us through an entire year, from December 2015 to December 2016, as viewed from a geostationary weather satellite centered over Oceania.

    The imagery is rather hypnotic, with clouds swirling day and night across the full field of view. Watch closely, though, and you’ll see a lot of neat phenomena from typhoons forming in the Pacific to wave clouds streaming from the islands of Japan. You can also see clouds blossoming (especially during the day) over the humid rainforests of Oceania.

    There are neat non-fluids phenomena, too, like a total solar eclipse and the permanent sunlight of Arctic and Antarctic summers. What do you notice? (Image and video credit: F. Dierich)

  • Featured Video Play Icon

    Expanding Water Beads

    In this timelapse, we see hydrogel beads expanding as they absorb water. There are some interesting subtleties to the physics here. Notice how, in the Petri dish segments, the beads shift from a single crystalline structure to several smaller structures. I suspect those shifts are driven by the dropping water level, which changes how surface tension interacts with the beads’ shape to create attractive forces between beads.

    Another interesting point comes as the beads expand through and out of the glass of water. Initially, the water level doesn’t change in the glass. This is because the water beads are taking up the same volume as the water that they’ve absorbed. But once the beads emerge past the water’s initial height, the water level drops dramatically. That’s because the beads are still absorbing what little water is left and continuing to expand in volume. (Image and video credit: Temponaut)

  • Featured Video Play Icon

    ‘Aila’Au: Forest Eater

    The 2018 eruption of Kilauea was a dramatic example of nature’s power. This short film shows both some familiar views of that eruption as well as new ones. I found the slow-moving wall of cooling a’a lava eating the forest particularly intriguing, not least thanks to the glass-like sound of the lava advancing. Whether slow-moving or fast, lava’s destructive power is incredible to watch. (Video and image credit: Page Films)

  • Featured Video Play Icon

    “Focus, Vol. 1”

    In “Focus, Vol. 1,” photographer Roman De Giuli follows colorful droplets as they roll along, chase one another, and burst. You may notice that many of the drops seem attracted to one another. This is actually a surface tension effect caused by the dimples the droplets create on the surface; it’s the same effect responsible for Cheerios clumping together in your milk. Interestingly, though, the oil coating the drops doesn’t seem to drain quickly enough for the clumping drops to actually coalesce. (Image and video credit: R. De Giuli)