What goes on inside an evaporating droplet made up of more than one fluid? This is a perennially fascinating question with lots of permutations. In this one, researchers observed water-poor Keep reading
Tag: flow visualization
Within a Drop
In this macro video, various chemical reactions swirl inside a single dangling droplet. Despite its tiny size, quite a lot can go on in a drop like this. Both the Keep reading
Blooming in Blue
Summers in the Barents Sea — a shallow region off the northern coasts of Norway and Russia — trigger phytoplankton blooms like the one in this satellite image. The blue Keep reading
Strata of Starlings
Starlings come together in groups of up to thousands of birds for the protection of numbers. These flocks form spellbinding, undulating masses known as murmurations, where the movement of individual Keep reading
The Best of FYFD 2024
Welcome to another year and another look back at FYFD’s most popular posts. (You can find previous editions, too, for 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, and Keep reading
Active Cheerios Self-Propel
The interface where air and water meet is a special world of surface-tension-mediated interactions. Cereal lovers are well-aware of the Cheerios effect, where lightweight O’s tend to attract one another, Keep reading
Inside the Squirting Cucumber
Though only 5 cm long, the squirting cucumber can spray its seeds up to 10 meters away. The little fruit does so through a clever combination of preparation and ballistic Keep reading
A Mini Jupiter
Astronaut Don Pettit posted this image of a Jupiter-like water globe he created on the International Space Station. In microgravity, surface tension reigns as the water’s supreme force, pulling the Keep reading
Predicting Droplet Sizes
Squeeze a bottle of cleaning spray, and the nozzle transforms a liquid jet into a spray of droplets. These droplets come in many sizes, and predicting them is difficult because Keep reading
Growing Downstream
This astronaut photo shows Madagascar’s largest estuary, as of 2024. On the right side, the Betsiboka River flows northwest (right to left, in the image). Less than 100 years ago, Keep reading