When small, heavy particles are in a turbulent flow, they settle faster than in a quiescent one. Their interactions with turbulent eddies sweep them along, extracting energy that lengthens their Keep reading
Category: Research
How Fabric Dries
How do damp clothes dry in air? Such a seemingly simple question has vexed physicists for years because it’s extremely difficult to observe what happens inside the cloth fibers. Now Keep reading
Squishy Actuators
Hard materials don’t always work well in robotics. Here, researchers build soft actuators that can bend, curl, and tighten in order to manipulate objects. They begin by injecting liquid elastomer Keep reading
Box Closing Physics
My fellow board game aficionados (and anyone else who regularly opens and closes lidded boxes) have probably noticed the way a lid drops slowly onto its box once aligned. The Keep reading
Making Yeast-Free Pizza
Yeast is a key ingredient in many pizza doughs; as the yeast ferment sugars in the dough, they produce carbon dioxide which bubbles into the dough, creating the light and Keep reading
Dispelling Ice
In winter weather, delays pile up at airports when planes need de-icing. Our current process involves spraying thousands of gallons of chemicals on planes, but these chemicals are easily removed Keep reading
Surf’s Up!
Inspired by honeybees and their ability to surf on capillary waves of their own making, researchers have developed SurferBot, a low-cost, untethered, vibration-driven surf robot. Built on a simple 3D-printed Keep reading
Mixing the Immiscible
Immiscible liquids — like oil and water — do not combine easily. Typically, with enough effort, you can create an emulsion — a mixture formed from droplets of one liquid Keep reading
Coronal Heating
Compared to its interior, the surface of our sun is a cool 6,000 degrees Celsius. But beyond the surface, the sun’s corona heats up dramatically through interactions between plasma and Keep reading
Electronic Friction
Years ago, physicists discovered that water flows with surprisingly little friction through narrow carbon nanotubes. At our scale, flow behavior is typically the opposite: there’s greater friction (and, thus, slower Keep reading