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Search results for: “art”

  • “Alive Painting”

    “Alive Painting”

    Artist Akiko Nakayama’s intuitive grasp of fluid dynamics is so good that she manipulates liquids live to musical accompaniment. Her dendritic paintings — made from a combination of acrylic paint and isopropyl alcohol — inspired scientific research papers. There’s no substitute, I’m sure, for seeing her art live, but you can get a taste of her performances in the video below. Then you can head over to Physics World for more on the artist, her inspirations, and her scientific collaborations. (Image credits: H. Akagi and A. Nakayama; video credit: Eternal Art Space; via Physics World)

  • How Magnetic Fields Shape Core Flows

    How Magnetic Fields Shape Core Flows

    The Earth’s inner core is a hot, solid iron-rich alloy surrounded by a cooler, liquid outer core. The convection and rotation in this outer core creates our magnetic fields, but those magnetic fields can, in turn, affect the liquid metal flowing inside the Earth. Most of our models for these planetary flows are simplified — dropping this feedback where the flow-induced magnetic field affects the flow.

    The simplification used, the Taylor-Proudman theorem, assumes that in a rotating flow, the flow won’t cross certain boundaries. (To see this in action, check out this Taylor column video.) The trouble is, our measurements of the Earth’s actual interior flows don’t obey the theorem. Instead, they show flows crossing that imaginary boundary.

    To explore this problem, researchers built a “Little Earth Experiment” that placed a rotating tank (representing the Earth’s inner and outer core) filled with a transparent, magnetically-active fluid inside a giant magnetic. This setup allowed researchers to demonstrate that, in planetary-like flows, the magnetic field can create flow across the Taylor-Proudman boundary. (Image credit: C. Finley et al.; research credit: A. Pothérat et al.; via APS Physics)

  • Ember Bursts Spread Wildfires

    Ember Bursts Spread Wildfires

    In a wildfire, a burst of embers lofted upward can travel far, starting a new spot fire when they land. Although large ember bursts only happen occasionally, researchers found that these events — with orders of magnitude more embers than usual — play an outsized role in wildfire spread. In their experiments, researchers observed a bonfire with high-speed cameras to track ember bursts, and they also collected fallen embers from around their fire. They found large (>1 mm) embers could travel much further than current fire models predicted, carried by rare but powerful updrafts that coincided with large bursts. Their work indicates that wildfire models need a better way to simulate these kinds of events that are far from the fire’s baseline state but which occur often enough and with enough impact that they can spread fires. (Image credit: C. Cook; research credit: A. Peterson and T. Banerjee; via Physics World)

  • Seeking Mars’ Past

    Seeking Mars’ Past

    Although Mars is quite dry and inhospitable today, our rovers continue to search for evidence of a past Mars that could have sustained life. A recent study suggests that, at least in Gale Crater, the opportunities for life to flourish may have been short-lived. In particular, the team looked at carbonates found by the Curiosity rover. These minerals contain varying amounts of carbon and oxygen isotopes that can hint at the conditions the carbonates formed under. The team found a high proportion of heavier isotopes, which suggest one of two possible formation paths. In the first, Gale Crater underwent wet-dry cycles that alternated between more- and less-habitable conditions for life. The second possibility is a cryogenic past, where most of the local water was locked in ice, and life would have had to survive — if possible — in small pockets of extremely salty water. Neither possibility is a great one for the kinds of life we’re accustomed to. (Image credit: NASA; research credit: D. Burtt et al.; via Gizmodo)

  • Herding Sheep

    Herding Sheep

    Flocks of birds, schools of fish, and herds of sheep all resemble fluids at times, and physicists have been trying to recreate their collective motion for decades. Many of these models simplify the animals into particles that follow simple rules based on the direction and speed of their neighbors. Over time, the models have grown more complex; for example, some might differentiate a “sheepdog” particle from “sheep” particles. And some models even tweak the “sheep” to account for the personality traits that real sheep show, like how skittish they behave toward a sheepdog. Physics World has a neat overview of several studies in this vein. (Image credit: E. Osmanoglu; via Physics World)

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    Non-Newtonian Raindrops

    Fluids like air and water are called Newtonian because their viscosity does not vary with the force that’s applied to them. But many common fluids — almost everything in your fridge or bathroom drawer, for example — are non-Newtonian, meaning that their viscosity changes depending on how they’re deformed.

    Non-Newtonian droplets can behave very differently than Newtonian ones, as this video demonstrates. Here, their fluid of choice is water with varying amounts of silica particles added. Depending on how many silica particles are in the water, the behavior of an impacting drop varies from liquid-like to completely solid and everything in between. Why such a great variation? It all has to do with how quickly the droplet tries to deform and whether the particles within it can move in that amount of time. Whenever they can’t, they jam together and behave like a solid. (Image, video, and research credit: S. Arora and M. Driscoll)

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    “Chemical Somnia”

    Under a macro lens, even a petri dish worth of fluids comes vividly to life. Here, artist Scott Portingale explores crystallization, Marangoni effects, and other phenomena alongside a haunting soundtrack from musician Gorkem Sen. Enjoy! (Image and video credit: S. Portingale et al.)

  • Hello, STEVE

    Hello, STEVE

    A purple glow arcs across the night sky. Just another aurora, or is it? First described in 2018, this is a STEVE — Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement. (Yes, the name “Steve” came first and the acronym came later.) Scientists still aren’t entirely sure how to classify this glowing phenomenon. Although it looks similar to an aurora, its color spectrum is continuous between 400 and 700 nanometers; classic auroras, in contrast, have a discrete spectrum dependent on which atmospheric molecules are getting stimulated by the incoming solar wind. Scientists have noticed that STEVE appears before midnight and is accompanied by a fast 5.5 km/s westward ion flow. A dawnside equivalent with an eastward ion flow was reported just this year.

    With newly identified phenomena like this, the research papers are fast and furious as the scientific community searches for consensus on exactly what STEVE is and how it’s formed. But this domain is not reserved for professional astronomers alone; citizen scientists were the first to identify STEVE and open projects like Aurorasaurus continue to provide valuable data and observations. (Image credit: K. Trinder/NASA; research credit: S. Nanjo et al.; via Gizmodo)

  • Sea Ice Swirls

    Sea Ice Swirls

    Fragments of sea ice tumble and swirl in this satellite image of Greenland’s east coast. In spring, Arctic sea ice journeys down the Fram Strait between Greenland and Svalbard. Along the way, large ice floes break — and melt — into smaller pieces. Large pieces of sea ice are visible closer to the coastline, but the smaller individual floes get, the wispier they appear in the satellite image. In the haziest portions of the image, the ice may be only meters across. In recent years, less and less Arctic sea ice has survived the journey southward, shifting the temperature and salinity of Arctic contributions to global ocean circulation. (Image credit: W. Liang; via NASA Earth Observatory)

  • Blocking Bubbles

    Blocking Bubbles

    Many industrial processes, including those producing aluminum and “green” hydrogen, use electrodes to speed up chemical reactions. Unfortunately, bubbles that form on the electrode reduce its efficiency anywhere from 10 to 25 percent by blocking parts of the electrode. The assumption has been that any area shadowed by bubbles is blocked, but a recent study shows that’s not the case. Instead, it’s only the electrode area in direct contact with the bubble that’s blocked.

    To show this, researchers looked at a smooth electrode where bubbles formed randomly (left) and a nanotextured one with many spots where bubbles could form (right). In the animation above, bubble shadows are highlighted with circles. There are clearly more bubbles on the nanotextured electrode, but it actually performs better than the smooth electrode because the bubble contact area is smaller. (Image and research credit: J. Lake et al.; via MIT News)

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