Artist Alberto Seveso returns to his colorful ink plumes (1, 2, 3, 4, 5), but this time with a twist. Here, Seveso took ink injected in water and digitally altered it, adding texture and shaping the ink to mimic the shapes of coral reefs. The results are stunning, though I confess a few of them remind me of mushrooms or organs more than reefs. (Image credit: A. Seveso; via Colossal)
Droplets of paint whirl to Chopin’s “Nocturne Op. 9 No. 2” in this short film from artist Thomas Blanchard. The glitter particles in the paints act as seed particles that highlight the flow within and around each drop. It’s a beautiful dance of surface tension, advection, and buoyancy. (Image and video credits: T. Blanchard; via Colossal)
Push air into a gap filled with a viscous fluid, and you’ll get the branching, dendritic pattern of a Saffman-Taylor instability. Here, researchers use a similar set-up: injection into a narrow gap between transparent planes to explore something quite different. In this experiment, the gap was initially filled with a mixture of air and tiny hydrophobic glass beads. When the team injected a viscous mixture of water and glycerol, new patterns emerged. At low injection rates, a single finger structure formed. But at high injection rates, a whole spoke-like pattern formed. (Image and research credit: D. Zhang et al.; via Physics Today)
As charged particles from the solar wind bombard the upper atmosphere, a glowing plasma forms and dances in the sky. The green light of the plasma reflects off moistened sand, rippled by the passage of wind and tide. Each component seems simple, but this striking image contains hidden depths of fluid dynamics. Magnetohydrodynamics govern the aurora’s dance; the sand’s self-organization mirrors dune physics; and even the rocky outcropping in the background was carefully shaped by erosive forces from wind and water. Truly, fluid dynamics are found everywhere. (Image credit: L. Tenti; via 2023 Astronomy POTY)
The sun‘s surface and atmosphere are endlessly dynamic, with magnetic lines, plasma, and convection creating a constant churn. In this photo by astrophotographer Eduardo Schaberger Poupeau, a curving question-mark-like filament appears above the sun’s surface. Even with decades of high-resolution data from recent solar probes, we struggle to understand the complex physics that feed structures like these. (Image credit: E. Poupeau; via 2023 Astronomy POTY)
Artist Dan Coe uses lidar data to create portraits of rivers and their past meanders. Used aerially, lidar produces high-resolution elevation data that provides a glimpse of features that are currently hidden beneath vegetation. With rivers, this means unearthing some of their previous paths. Secondary flows in a river bend erode the bed so that the bend gets more and more strongly curved. Eventually, the river can double back on itself and cut off the long curve. Repeat that process over millennia and you wind up with the complex paths in Coe’s images. (Image credit: D. Coe; via Colossal)
Dripping, drooping pottery is artist Philip Kupferschmidt’s specialty. Covered in drips and drops, slumping as if half-melted, Kupferschmidt’s ceramics seem partially liquid. With their colorful glazes, these pieces ooze personality. (Image credit: P. Kupferschmidt; via Colossal)
This award-winning photo by Thomas Vijayan shows waterfalls of ice melt off the Austfonna ice cap. The third-largest glacier in Europe, Austfonna is located in Norway’s Svalbard archipelago. Like other glaciers, it sees rising temperatures and increased melting due to climate change. Vijayan highlights that melting with his focus on the many waterfalls slicing through the ice. All that meltwater contributes to changes in local salinity as well as rising sea levels worldwide. (Image credit: T. Vijayan; via Nature TTL POTY)
Eighteen meters long and powered only by the wind, artist Theo Jansen’s latest Strandbeest strolls the sand in this short video. Its complex movements — a swinging gait in some places and a caterpillar-like wave in others — are mesmerizing and life-like enough to almost make you wonder if the contraption truly is alive. See some of Jansen’s previous creations here. (Video and image credit: T. Jansen et al.; via Colossal)
James Bond notoriously orders his martinis “shaken, not stirred,” a request bartenders fulfill by shaking the cocktail over ice in a separate shaker. But what if you shake the martini glass itself? That’s the question that inspired this lovely mixology.
By shaking the martini glass gently back and forth (along the directions shown by the arrows in each image), the team created different mixing patterns within the glass. With a little food dye and pearl dust, they visualized the flows they found. By changing the viscosity of the cocktail and the speed of the swish, they made everything from a four-leaf clover to a cadre of ghosts. It seems that martini glasses hold a flow for every occasion! (Image and research credit: X. Song et al.; submitted by Zhao P.)
