A thread of mineral oil laid across a pool of water twists and turns like a river run wild. Because the oil has a lower surface tension than the water, Keep reading
Tag: 2016gofm
Tightrope Walkair
A bubble rising through water can get caught on an aerophilic (air-attracting) fiber. The bubble will then adhere to the fiber and be guided to the surface by it. In Keep reading
Freezing Impact
When a water droplet hits a frozen surface, what happens depends significantly on the temperature of the substrate. At relatively high temperatures (-20 degrees C), the droplet freezes without any Keep reading
Falling Atop Sheets
A sphere falling into water is a classic problem in fluid dynamics, but scientists are becoming increasingly interested in what happens when they introduce new dimensions to the problem. Here Keep reading
Visualizing Flow with Snowfall
One of the challenges in engineering and operating wind turbines is that full-scale turbines rarely behave as predicted in smaller-scale laboratory experiments and simulations. One way to reconcile these differences Keep reading
Inside Cavitation
Cavitation bubbles live a short and violent life. It begins when a low-pressure void forms in a fluid–for example, when a liquid is accelerated so that the pressure drops below Keep reading
Mixing Fresh and Salty
Earth’s oceans are a complex and dynamic environment, but fortunately, we can simulate some of their physics on a smaller scale in the laboratory. The time series of images above Keep reading
Starfish Vortices
Starfish larvae, like other microorganisms, use tiny hair-like cilia to move the fluid around them. By beating these cilia in opposite directions on different parts of their bodies, the larvae Keep reading
Coarsening in a Soap Film
Flow in a soap film is driven by gravity’s efforts to thin the film and surface tension’s attempts to stabilize variations in thickness. Because evaporation guarantees that the soap film Keep reading
The Blue Whirl
We wrote earlier this year about the discovery of a new type of fire whirl – the blue whirl – but now the authors have published video of the blue whirl Keep reading