Natural oils provide critical nutrients to filter feeders like zooplankton and barnacles. These creatures capture oil droplets on bristle-like appendages such as cilia and setae. But this droplet-catching turns into Keep reading
Category: Research
Testing Granular Gas Theory
When excited, a group of particles can behave much like a gas. These granular gases exhibit many similarities to molecular gases but contain one vital difference: without a constant input Keep reading
Bacterial Turbulence
Conventional fluid dynamical wisdom posits that any flows at the microscale should be laminar. Tiny swimmers like microorganisms live in a world dominated by viscosity, therefore, there can be no Keep reading
Why Slicing Tomatoes Works
Picture it: a nice, ripe tomato. Your not-so-recently sharpened kitchen knife. You press the blade down into the soft flesh and… it explodes. Soft solids – like a tomato – Keep reading
Shear in Shaken Sands
The dynamics inside a shaken granular material, like sand, are fascinatingly complex. In this study, researchers used x-ray radiograms to peer inside a horizontally-shaken container of sand. They found that Keep reading
Flexible Filament Reduces Drag
Most shapes aren’t streamlined for fluid flow. We call these bulky, often boxy shapes, bluff bodies. Above, we see two examples of a bluff body, a flat plate, in a Keep reading
Branching Gels
If you sandwich a viscous fluid between two plates, then pull the plates apart, you’ll often get a complex branching pattern that forms as air pushes its way into the Keep reading
Crystalline Critters
In 5th grade, I grew crystals by evaporating solutions of salt water from miniature pie tins. The results were white, boxy crystals whose size depended on how much salt I’d Keep reading
Fungal Fluid Dynamics
Many plants gain the soil-bound nutrients they need by trading with symbiotic fungi. Underground, these fungi spread networks that gather and store phosphorus, which they then trade with host plants Keep reading
Droplets From Jets
On the ocean, countless crashing waves are creating bubbles. When they burst, those bubbles generate jets and droplets that spray into the sky, carrying sea salt, dust, and biological material Keep reading