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: fluid dynamics
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
Why Icy Giants Have Strange Magnetic Fields
When Voyager 2 visited Uranus and Neptune, scientists were puzzled by the icy giants’ disorderly magnetic fields. Contrary to expectations, neither planet had a well-defined north and south magnetic pole, 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
Tracking Coastal Sediment Loss
Shorelines rely on an influx of sediment to counter what’s lost to erosion by waves and currents. But tracking that sediment flux is challenging in coastal regions where salt, waves, Keep reading
Cavitation Near Soft Surfaces
Collapsing cavitation bubbles are sometimes used to break up kidney stones, and they may find other uses in medicine as well. Here, researchers investigate the collapse of laser-triggered cavitation bubbles 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
Tracking Tonga’s Boom
When the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano erupted in January 2022, its effects were felt — and heard — thousands of kilometers away. A new study analyzes crowdsourced data (largely from Keep reading
How Cooling Towers Work
Power plants (and other industrial settings) often need to cool water to control plant temperatures. This usually requires cooling towers like the iconic curved towers seen at nuclear power plants. Keep reading
A New Mantle Viscosity Shift
The rough picture of Earth’s interior — a crust, mantle, and core — is well-known, but the details of its inner structure are more difficult to pin down. A recent Keep reading