Wildfires are an ongoing challenge in the western United States, where droughts and warmer conditions have combined with a century of fire suppression to form perfect conditions for monstrous fires. It’s Keep reading
Tag: buoyancy
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 Keep reading
Granular Instabilities
Granular mixtures show surprising similarities to fluids, even though their underlying physics differ. The latest example of this is a Rayleigh-Taylor-like instability that occurs when heavy particles sit atop lighter Keep reading
The Bouncing Drop
For a droplet to bounce, we expect it to hit a wall or a sharp interface of some kind. But in a new study, researchers demonstrate a droplet that bounces Keep reading
The Art of Paper Marbling
Known as ebru in Turkey and suminagashi in Japan, the art of paper marbling has flourished in cultures around the world since medieval times. The details of methods vary, but Keep reading
The Shaky Life of a Droplet
An evaporating drop of ouzo goes through several stages due to the interactions of oil, alcohol and water. If you turn the situation around by placing a drop of (blue-dyed) Keep reading
Lava Bomb
What you see above is a homemade lava bomb. To systematically study what happens when groundwater meets lava, scientists melted basalt and created their own meter-scale explosion-on-demand. Inside the container, Keep reading
What Drives Droplets
There’s been a lot of interest recently in what goes on inside droplets made up of more than one fluid as they evaporate. This can be entertaining with liquids like Keep reading
Carbonation in Microgravity
Bubbly beverages are popular among humans, but there’s surprising complexity underlying their seemingly simply carbonation, as explored in a new Physics Today article. Most drinks get their bubbles from carbon dioxide, Keep reading
Bubbling
Many chemical reactions produce gases as a stream of bubbles out of a solution. Here we see the electrolysis of an aqueous sodium hydroxide solution (NaOH), which produces hydrogen gas Keep reading