Collapsing cavitation bubbles are sometimes used to break up kidney stones, and they may find other uses in medicine as well. Here, researchers investigate the collapse of laser-triggered cavitation bubbles Keep reading
Category: Phenomena
How Cooling Towers Work
Power plants (and other industrial settings) often need to cool water to control plant temperatures. This usually requires cooling towers like the iconic curved towers seen at nuclear power plants. Keep reading
Jets, Shocks, and a Windblown Cavity
As material collapses onto a protostar, these young stars often form stellar jets that point outward along their axis of rotation. Made up of plasma, these jets shoot into the Keep reading
Tar Pit, Sweet Tar Pit
The La Brea Tar Pits have delivered countless creatures to their doom over tens of thousands of years. But the sticky quagmire of the pits’ natural asphalt is a comfy Keep reading
Soaring Through the Pillars of Creation
The Pillars of Creation are an iconic feature nestled within the Eagle Nebula. For decades, the public has admired Hubble’s images of this stellar nursery, and, in this video, we Keep reading
Revealing Gravity Waves
Severe weather — like thunderstorms, tornadoes, and hurricanes — can push air upward into a higher layer of the atmosphere and trigger gravity waves. Aboard the International Space Station (ISS), Keep reading
Glacial Tributaries
Just as rivers have tributaries that feed their flow, small glaciers can flow as tributaries into larger ones. This astronaut photo shows Siachen Glacier and four of its tributaries coming Keep reading
Wave Clouds in the Atacama
Striped clouds appear to converge over a mountaintop in this photo, but that’s an illusion. In reality, these clouds are parallel and periodic; it’s only the camera’s wide-angle lens that Keep reading
A Mini Jupiter
Astronaut Don Pettit posted this image of a Jupiter-like water globe he created on the International Space Station. In microgravity, surface tension reigns as the water’s supreme force, pulling the Keep reading
Skydiving Salamanders
The wandering salamander can spend its entire 20-year lifespan in the canopy of a coast redwood. When predators come calling, they have a special skill that helps them get away: Keep reading