FYFD

Category: Research

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    Ripple Bugs

    Ripple bugs are a type of water strider capable of moving at a blazing fast 120 body lengths per second across the water surface. In addition to their speed, ripple bugs are incredibly agile and are active almost constantly. Researchers believe they’ve found the insect’s secret: feather-like hydrophilic fans that spread on contact with the water. These fans help the insects push off the water and steer, but they require no effort to open and close. They’ve even adapted the technique to bio-inspired robots and seen improvements in speed, agility, and efficiency. (Video credit: Science; research credit: V. Ortega-Jimenez et al.)

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  • Panama’s Missing Pacific Upwelling

    Panama’s Missing Pacific Upwelling

    Strong seasonal winds blowing from the Atlantic typically push water away from Panama’s Pacific coast, allowing deeper, colder waters to rise up. This upwelling cools reefs and feeds phytoplankton blooms, both of which support the rich marine life found there. But in early 2025, the upwelling didn’t occur.

    Normally, coastal ocean temperatures drop to about 19 degrees Celsius during upwelling. Instead, temperatures only reached 23.3 degrees at their coolest. Wind seems to be the missing ingredient: winds from the Atlantic side were short-lived and 74% less frequent than in typical years.

    That lack of upwelling is expected to carry consequences to Panama’s economy. About 95% of the country’s fishing catch comes from the Pacific side, so any drop in fish populations will be felt. The open question remains: was the missing upwelling a singular extreme event or a harbinger of a new normal? (Image credit: R. Heuvel; research credit: A. O’Dea et al.; via Eos)

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  • Controlling Hovering

    Controlling Hovering

    Hummingbirds and many insects hover when feeding, escaping predators, and mating. While scientists have decoded the mechanics of a hummingbird’s figure-8-like hovering wingstroke, it’s been harder to understand how the creatures control their hovering. Most of our attempts to control hovering require more computational power than hummingbirds and insects are thought to have. But this study describes a new control scheme: one that allows stable, real-time hovering with little computational cost. (Image credit: J. Wainscoat; research credit: A. Elgohary and S. Eisa; via APS)

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  • Acoustically Trapping Nanoparticles

    Acoustically Trapping Nanoparticles

    Micrometer-sized particles can be trapped in place against a flow using acoustic waves. But smaller nano-sized particles feel less radiation pressure from acoustic waves, and so keep moving in the flow. But new work shows that it is possible to trap those nanoparticles with some additional help.

    In this case, researchers seeded their flow with microparticles that were held in place by acoustic waves against the background flow. When nanoparticles were added to the mix, they remained trapped in the wells between microparticles due to a combination of acoustic forcing and the hydrodynamic shielding of the nearby large particles. (Image credit: P. Czerwinski; research credit: A. Pavlič and T. Baasch; via APS)

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  • Turbulence-Suppressing Polymers

    Turbulence-Suppressing Polymers

    Adding just a little polymer to a pipe flow speeds it up by reducing drag near the wall. But the effects on turbulence away from the wall have been harder to suss out. A new experiment shows that added polymers suppress eddy formation in the flow and reduce how much energy is lost to friction and, ultimately, heat. In particular, the researchers found that polymer stress helped stabilize shear layers in the flow and prevent them from destabilizing into more turbulent flow. (Image credit: S. Wilkinson; research credit: Y. Zhang et al.; via APS)

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  • Ocean Bubbles Capture Carbon

    Ocean Bubbles Capture Carbon

    As humanity pumps carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, the ocean absorbs about a quarter of it. This exchange happens largely through bubbles created by breaking waves. When waves grow large enough to break, their crests curl over and crash down, trapping air beneath them. The turbulence of the upper ocean can push these buoyant bubbles meters under the surface, where the gases inside them dissolve into the surrounding water. This is how the ocean gets the oxygen used by marine animals, but it’s also how it gathers up carbon dioxide.

    Current climate models often approximate this process using only the wind speed, but a recent study took matters a step further by modeling wave breaking and bubble generation, too. While they found a global carbon uptake that was similar to existing models, the researchers found their breaking wave model showed more variability in where carbon gets stored. For example, more carbon got absorbed in the southern hemisphere, where oceans are consistently rougher, than in the northern hemisphere, where large landmasses shelter the oceans. (Image credit: J. Kernwein; research credit: P. Rustogi et al.; via Eos)

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  • The Start of a Supernova

    The Start of a Supernova

    Stars about eight times more massive than our sun end their lives in supernovas, incredible explosions that rip the star apart. The earliest stages of this explosion are something we’ve never observed firsthand, until now. A new study reports observations of the supernovaΒ explosionΒ SNΒ 2024ggi, detected here on Earth on 10 April 2024. Only 26 hours later, researchers pointed the Very Large Telescope at it, capture data that revealed its oblong shape as the initial explosion reached the star’s surface.

    What you see above and below are not the actual supernova. They are an artist’s conception of the event, based on the researchers’ observation data. That data is enough to rule out several existing supernova models and will no doubt guide new models of star death going forward. (Image credit: ESO/L. CalΓ§ada; research credit: Y. Yang et al.; via Gizmodo)

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  • Quantum Rayleigh-Taylor Instability

    Quantum Rayleigh-Taylor Instability

    The Rayleigh-Taylor instability–typically marked by mushroom-shaped plumes–occurs when a dense fluid accelerates into a less dense one. But researchers have now demonstrated the effect at quantum scales, too.

    For their experiment, the group used a Bose-Einstein condensate of sodium atoms and made the interface between them by exciting half of the atoms into a spin-up state and half into a spin-down one. With the interface is place, they reversed the magnetic field gradient, inducing a force on the atoms equivalent to the buoyant force seen in conventional Rayleigh-Taylor instabilities. As shown above, the interface first warped, then developed Rayleigh-Taylor mushrooms and eventually became turbulent. (Image and research credit: Y. Geng et al.; via Physics World)

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  • Deep Breaths Renew Lung Surfactants + A Special Announcement

    Deep Breaths Renew Lung Surfactants + A Special Announcement

    Taking a deep breath may actually help you breathe easier, according to a new study. When we inhale, air fills our alveoli–tiny balloon-like compartments within our lungs. To make alveoli easier to open, they’re coated in a surfactant chemical produced by our lungs. Just as soap’s surfactant molecules squeezing between water molecules lowers the interface’s surface tension, our lung surfactants gather at the interface and lower the surface tension, making alveoli easier to inflate.

    But things are a little more complicated in our lungs than in our kitchen sink because of our constant cycle of breathing, which stretches and compresses our lungs’ surfaces and surfactant layers. Imagine a flat interface, lined with surfactant molecules; then stretch it. As the interface stretches, gaps open between the surfactant molecules and allowing molecules from the interior of the liquid to push their way to the newly stretched interface, changing the surface tension. If the interface gets compressed, some of the excess molecules will get pushed back into the liquid bulk.

    In looking at how lung surfactants respond to these cycles of compression and stretching, the researchers found that the lung liquid develops a microstructure during cycles of shallow breathing that makes the surface tension higher, thus making lungs harder to fill. In contrast, a deep breath like a sigh replenished the saturated lipids at the interface, lowering surface tension and making lungs more compliant. So a deep sigh actually can help you breathe easier. (Image credit: F. MΓΈller; research credit: M.. Novaes-Silva et al.; via Gizmodo)

    P.S. — I’ve got a book (chapter)! Several years ago, I joined an amazing group of women to write two books (one for middle grades and one for older audiences) about our journeys as scientists. And they are out now! In fact, today we’re holding a “Book Bomb” where we aim for as many of us as possible to buy the book(s) on the same day. If you’d like to join (and get ahead on your gift shopping), here are (affiliate) links:

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  • Wobbling Plasma Could Help Planets Grow

    Wobbling Plasma Could Help Planets Grow

    To form planets, the dust and gas around a star has to start clumping up. While there are many theories as to how this could happen, it’s a difficult process to observe. A recent study shows that a magnetorotational (MR) instability could do the job.

    The team used a Taylor-Couette set-up (where an inner cylinder rotates inside an outer cylinder) filled with a liquid metal alloy. With the cylinders moving relative to one another at over 2,000 rotations per minute, the team measured how the magnetic field changed in the churning fluid. Parts of the liquid metal formed free shear layers, and within these, the MR instability occurred, causing some regions to slow down and others to speed up.

    The experiments suggest that triggering a MR instability is easier to achieve than once thought, which supports the possibility that it occurs in protoplanetary disks, helping to drive dust together into planets. (Image credit: ALMA/ESO/NAOJ/NRAO; research credit: Y. Wang et al.; via Eos)

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