FYFD

Search results for: “art”

  • Stretching Ant Rafts

    Stretching Ant Rafts

    In their natural habitat, fire ants experience frequent floods and so developed the ability to form rafts. Entire colonies will float out a flood in a two-ant-thick raft anchored to whatever vegetation they can find. Because ants in the upper layer of the raft are constantly milling about, the rafts have some ability to “self-heal” as they’re stretched.

    Pulling slowly gives the ants time to "heal" their stretching raft.
    Pulling slowly gives the ants time to “heal” their stretching raft.

    In these experiments, researchers slowly (above) and quickly (below) stretched ant rafts to see how they responded. Given a slow enough stretch, the ants were able to adjust and keep the raft together until it doubled in length. In contrast, a faster stretching rate overwhelmed the raft by the time it was 30% longer. (Image credit: top – Wikimedia Commons, others – C. Chen et al.; research credit: C. Chen et al.; via APS Physics)

    Pulling quickly breaks an ant raft because the ants cannot react quickly enough to heal the raft.
    Pulling quickly breaks an ant raft because the ants cannot react fast enough to heal the raft.
  • Variations on a Theme by Edgerton

    Variations on a Theme by Edgerton

    In the 1930s, Harold Edgerton used strobed lighting to capture moments too fast for the human eye, including his famous “Milk-Drop Coronet”. Recreating his set-up is far easier today, thanks to technologies like Arduino boards that make timing the drop-strobe-camera sequence simple. This poster is a collage of Edgerton-like images captured by students at Brown University. Even nearly a century after Edgerton, there are countless variations on this beautiful slice of physics: all from the splash of a simple drop striking a pool. (Image credit: R. Zenit et al.)

  • Lasing Bubbles

    Lasing Bubbles

    The thin shells of bubbles interact with light in fascinating ways; that is, of course, the source of their brilliant colors. In this recent study, researchers discovered that bubbles can serve as tunable lasers. A laser has three major components: an energy source, an optical resonator, and a gain medium that amplifies light in the resonator. For bubble lasers, an external pump laser provides energy and the bubble’s thin shell acts as a resonator. Fluorescent dye in the bubble serves as the gain medium.

    Once formed, the bubble lasers are incredibly sensitive to electric fields and pressure changes, making them excellent sensors. For added stability, the team is using smectic liquid crystal bubbles, which, unlike soap bubbles, don’t evaporate easily. (Video, image, and research credit: Z. Korenjak and M. Humar; via APS Physics)

  • Tumbling in Air

    Tumbling in Air

    When snowflakes and volcanic ash fall, they tumble. Historically, it’s been too hard to observe this behavior first hand — the particles are too small to easily follow with a camera — so scientists instead looked at larger particles falling through water. That change preserves important characteristics of the physics, but it misses out on one key feature: in air, the density of the falling particle is much higher than air’s.

    A football-shaped particle wobbles around its stable orientation as it falls through air.
    A football-shaped particle wobbles around its stable orientation as it falls through air.

    To account for that, researchers built a special apparatus that drops particles one-at-a-time through the field of view of four high-speed cameras. This setup gave them a narrow 1-mm band where they could track a falling particle’s orientation — provided the particle fell through the band, which happened about 20% of the time. Their results show that particles in air tumble and oscillate back and forth around their stable orientation more than in water experiments. This difference affects how quickly particles settle, which, in turn, affects how much they tend to clump and grow. (Image credit: snow – A. Burden, experiment – T. Bhowmick et al.; research credit: T. Bhowmick et al.; via APS Physics)

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    Icelandic Eruption

    When I started FYFD, volcano footage was far rarer. These days the affordability and durability of drones and action cameras — along with the relative accessibility of eruptions in places like Iceland and Hawaii — means we get to see volcanic flows in glorious high definition. This footage comes from the recent Icelandic eruption on the Reykjanes peninsula. Lava fountains line the four-kilometer lava vent seen here, and flows from the vent spread into a delta-like fan in the field below. I never get tired of staring at molten rock that flows like water. (Video and image credit: I. Finnbogason; via Colossal)

  • Water Reduces Coffee’s Charge

    Water Reduces Coffee’s Charge

    Grinding coffee beans builds up electrical charge as the beans fracture into smaller and smaller pieces. The polarity of the charge depends on the bean’s moisture content; lighter roasts tend toward a positive charge, and darker roasts skew negative. The finer the grind, the stronger the electrical charge and the greater the problem of clumping grains becomes. Adding a few drops of water to the beans before grinding, researchers found, drastically reduces the electrical charge and clumping. This, the team reports, would let espresso lovers brew a stronger cup with less material. A well-compacted bed of unclumped grains has less void space, which slows down water’s percolation and increases the amount of coffee the water can extract. The authors encourage readers to try adding water in their own home brews, but they caution that coffee mass and grind setting should also be variables in the experiment. (Image credit: N. Van; research credit: J. Harper et al.; via APS Physics)

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    Visualizing Changes

    This rather mesmerizing video by Michiel de Boer uses a video editing technique to highlight movement and changes in video clips. From falling rain to rising mist to passing footsteps, the relatively simple technique visualizes all kinds of motion. De Boer calls it “motion extraction,” but it’s essentially a way to play with autocorrelation, a mathematical technique often used in fluid dynamics. It’s especially prevalent in turbulence, where it helps researchers identify parts of the flow that are closely related to one another. (Video and image credit: M. de Boer; via Colossal)

  • Reimagining Mars’ Interior

    Reimagining Mars’ Interior

    Older models of Mars assumed a liquid metal core beneath a solid mantle of silicates, but recent studies indicate that structure is missing at least one layer. Using data from the InSight lander’s seismometer, two teams independently calculated that a liquid silicate layer must surround the planet’s core. In September 2021, three meteorite pieces impacted Mars far from the InSight lander’s position. Since the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter could exactly pinpoint the impact location, researchers were able to calculate just how long it took seismic waves from the impact to reach the lander.

    Like on Earth, Mars has two varieties of seismic wave: transverse S-waves that only travel through solids and longitudinal P-waves that travel through both liquid and solid layers. S-waves reflect off any liquid-solid boundary, following a different path to a seismometer than P-waves that refract across the boundary and travel through liquid. For more of the story behind this discovery, check out this article at Physics Today. (Image credit: Mars – NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona, illustration – J. Sieben/J. Keisling; research credit: H. Samuel et al. and A. Khan et al.; via Physics Today)

    An illustration of Mars' interior and the paths followed by seismic waves before InSight picked them up.
    An illustration of Mars’ interior and the paths followed by seismic waves before InSight picked them up.
  • February Events

    February Events

    I have a couple of public(ish) events coming up this month, so I wanted to share the details for anyone interested in joining.

    Exploring By The Seat Of Your Pants – Feb 16

    This virtual event is part of a series of talks by myself and other AAAS IF/THEN ambassadors about our STEM careers. It’s geared toward K-12 classrooms, and any teachers who want to bring their class to my session (or another one) can register here. If you’d just like to tune in on your own, you can do that here. My talk takes place starting at 2:00pm Eastern time, and I’ll be discussing what I do as a science communicator, how I got here, and what traits might make you a good science communicator, too.

    Improbable Research Show – Feb 17

    The AAAS conference is in Denver this year, and I’m making a return to the annual Improbable Research show held at the conference. This will be a live event only. It’s free to attend, but I believe registration is required. The show begins at 8:00pm Mountain time, but in years past, showing up early has been required to get a seat. I’ll be talking about past Ig Nobel prize winners that connect to fluid dynamics. Like the Igs themselves, you can expect this show to be a little zany.

    (Image credit: Lyda Hill Philanthropies)

  • Upwelling at Cabo Frio

    Upwelling at Cabo Frio

    The shores of the Brazilian state of Rio de Janeiro boast turquoise waters, white sands, and green lagoons, but European explorers discovered the waters around one promontory were unusually cold, leading to the name Cabo Frio. The chilly waters can be 8 degrees Celsius cooler than nearby surface temperatures, thanks to cold water upwelling near the coast. The upwelling is wind-driven; the dominant northeasterly winds push water out to sea, allowing colder waters to rise from the deep. (Image credit: L. Dauphin; via NASA Earth Observatory)

    A map of sea surface temperatures near Cabo Frio in Brazil.
    A map of sea surface temperatures near Cabo Frio in Brazil.

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