Respiratory diseases like measles, flu, tuberculosis, and COVID-19 are all transmitted by droplets. Some are tiny and airborne, capable of traveling long distances. Other drops are larger and only capable Keep reading
Tag: droplets
Imitating a Cough
Coughing and sneezing create violent air flows in and around our bodies. As that fast air rushes over mucus layers in our lungs, throat, and sinuses, the resulting flow breaks Keep reading
Scooting Droplets
As a child, I always loved watching rain on the windows as I rode in the car. Hemispherical droplets got stretched by the wind flowing over them. But they never Keep reading
“Emerald and Stone”
“Emerald and Stone” is filmmaker Thomas Blanchard’s tribute to the music of Brian Eno. The short film is made, as Blanchard puts it, with “inks and painting,” but I suspect Keep reading
Gravity Changes Droplet Shapes
With small droplets, gravity usually has little effect compared to surface tension. An evaporating water droplet holds its spherical shape as it evaporates. But the story is different when you Keep reading
How a Leak Can Stop Itself
Some leaks can actually stop themselves, and a new analysis shows how. When a vertical pipe has a small hole, water initially spouts out of it, then dribbles, and, finally, Keep reading
Twisted Fibers
A drop sliding down a fiber can do so asymmetrically or symmetrically. The asymmetric configuration is unstable and will spontaneously shift to a symmetric one. Adding a second, parallel fiber Keep reading
Oil-Covered Bubbles Popping
When bubbles burst, they release smaller droplets from the jet that rebounds upward. Depending on their size, these droplets can fall back down or get lofted upward on air currents Keep reading
Giant Droplet Splashes
When droplets get larger than 0.27 cm, they no longer stay spherical as they fall. Here, researchers look at very large droplets (equivalent to 3.06 cm in diameter) falling into Keep reading
A 2D Splash
We see plenty of droplets splash when they fall into a pool, but what happens when the drop and pool are two-dimensional? Here researchers captured the familiar process of a Keep reading