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  • Cavitation Collapse

    Cavitation Collapse

    The collapse of a bubble underwater doesn’t seem like a very important matter, but when it happens near a solid surface, like part of a ship, it can be incredibly destructive. This video, featuring numerical simulations of the bubble’s collapse, shows why. 

    When near a surface, the bubble’s collapse is asymmetric, and this asymmetry creates a powerful jet that pushes through the bubble and impacts the opposite side. That impact generates a shock wave that travels out toward the wall. As the bubble hits its minimum volume, a second shock front is generated. Both shock waves travel toward the wall and reflect off it, generating high pressure all along the surface. (Image and video credit: S. Beig and E. Johnson)

  • How Waves Travel

    How Waves Travel

    When playing in the surf, it’s easy to imagine that the incoming waves are a wall of water crashing into the shore. And, in a way they are, but probably less so than you imagine. Waves travel through a medium, whether it’s solid or fluid, but for the most part, they’re not translating the medium itself. You can see that in the animation above by watching the dye beneath the surface. The passing waves don’t cause much mixing in the dye, and though their passage distorts the underlying water, we see that everything returns more or less to its starting position once the wave has passed. (Image credit: S. Morris, source)

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    “Vorticity 2”

    There’s no better way to appreciate our atmosphere than through timelapse, and photographer Mike Olbinski is a master at capturing the beauty and power of nature at work through this medium. In “Vorticity 2″, he highlights two full seasons of storm chasing in an incredible seven-and-a-half minutes. Prepare yourself for dramatic cloudscapes, torrential rains, and even twin tornadoes. This one deserves a watch on the biggest screen you have available. (Image and video credit: M. Olbinski; via Colossal)

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    Feathered Fighter Jets

    Peregrine falcons are built for speed. They’ve been clocked at more than 380 kilometers per hour when diving. This video from Deep Look examines some of the features that make these birds of prey so fast, from the shape of their eyes to the tubercles in their nostrils that help them breathe during high-pressure dives. 

    Part of the falcon’s speed comes from its signature stoop, where it pulls in its wings to form a tight, streamlined shape. This reduces drag forces on the falcon, letting gravity pull it toward a high terminal velocity. But even with its wings extended, the falcon exudes speed and agility. Its wings form a sharp leading edge to cut through the air, with stiff, overlapping feathers that slice the flow. Compare this to the feathers of an owl, which specializes in silence rather than speed for catching its prey. (Video and image credit: Deep Look)

  • Grayscale Aurora

    Grayscale Aurora

    This swirling grayscale image shows a spring aurora over the Hudson Bay, as seen by the Suomi NPP satellite. As energetic particles from the sun zip past Earth, they interact with our magnetosphere, which tends to channel particles toward the poles. At these higher latitudes, some of the particles get trapped along Earth’s magnetic field lines and crash into the upper atmosphere where they excite oxygen and nitrogen molecules. It’s this molecular bombardment that creates the distinctive colors of the aurora. (Image credit: J. Stevens; via NASA Earth Observatory)

  • Hiding From Waves

    Hiding From Waves

    Ocean waves can be dangerous for boats, particularly when operating near off-shore platforms. But a new study, inspired by electromagnetic waveguides, demonstrates a lab-scale water waveguide capable of damping out a range of waves experienced by any ship inside its protected area. The water waveguide sits below the surface, changing the water depth and therefore the propagation of surface waves. 

    When properly positioned, the waveguide nearly eliminates wave motion in a protected channel. You can see this in the right image, where waves are clearly present in the foreground but the toy boat hardly moves. Contrast this with the image on the left, where the boat bobs and rocks under the same wave conditions without the waveguide. The researchers hope their waveguide concept can help protect ships in wharves and harbors soon. (Image and research credit: S. Zou et al.; via APS Physics; submitted by Kam-Yung Soh)

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    Seeing with Sound

    Sound carries rich information about the environment through which it’s traveled. And while many sighted people never take the time to notice this, using sound to build a mental picture of the surrounding world is something many blind people do constantly, either by studying how sounds produced by others change (passive echolocation) or by using their own sounds to pinpoint what’s around them (active echolocation). 

    In the latest It’s Okay to Be Smart video, you have a chance to learn some of the basics of active echolocation and how you can train your brain to recognize and process this extra environmental information. 

    Personally, I am not very good at this. I can hear edges but it turns out I’m very bad at figuring out where they are. That said, having spent time recently in a few anechoic chambers – where sound reflection is almost completely damped out – I’ve come to realize that even as a sighted person, I rely on sound a lot more than I think I do! (Video and image credit: It’s Okay to Be Smart)

  • Plasma Shock Waves

    Plasma Shock Waves

    Solar flares and coronal mass ejections send out shock waves that reverberate through our solar system. But shock waves through plasma – the ionized, high-energy particles making up the solar wind – do not behave like our typical terrestrial ones. Instead of traveling through collisions between particles, these astrophysical shock waves are driven by interactions between moving, charged particles and magnetic fields. 

    A driving burst of plasma accelerated into ambient plasma creates electromagnetic forces that accelerate ambient ions to supersonic speeds, pushing the shock wave onward even without particles directly colliding. Thus far, piecing together the physics of these interactions has been a challenge because spacecraft are limited in what and where they can measure. But a group here on Earth has now recreated and observed some of this process in the lab. (Image credit: NASA Solar Dynamics Observatory; research credit: D. Schaeffer et al.; via phys.org)

  • Collecting Dew

    Collecting Dew

    In areas of the world where fresh water is scarce, one potential source is dew collection. Scientists have been working in recent years on making overnight dew collection more efficient. The challenge is that drops won’t begin to slide down an inclined surface until they are large enough for gravity to overcome the surface tension forces that pin the drop. Most efforts have focused on reducing the critical size where drops begin to slide through surface treatments and chemical coatings. 

    A recent study, however, uses a different tactic. Instead of aiming to reduce the critical drop size, these researchers built a grooved surface designed to encourage drops to grow faster. By helping the droplets coalesce quickly, their surface (right side) is able to start shedding droplets much faster than a smooth surface (left side). Under test conditions, the grooved surface was shedding droplets after only 30 minutes, whereas the smooth surface shed its first drops after 2 hours. (Image and research credit: P. Bintein et al.; see also APS Physics)

  • Volcanic Plume

    Volcanic Plume

    Astronauts aboard the International Space Station captured this dramatic image of Raikoke Volcano’s eruption in late June. This uninhabited Pacific Island is part of the Kuril Islands off mainland Russia. The hot plume of ash and volcanic gas rose until its density matched that of the surrounding air, at which point it could only expand horizontally. This is why the plume appears to have such a flat top. It’s similar to the cumulonimbus clouds we associate with severe thunderstorms. Scientists speculate that the white ring around the plume’s base might be water vapor condensed from ambient air pulled in to the plume’s base or a side-effect of magma flowing into the surrounding sea. (Image credit: NASA; via NASA Earth Observatory)

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