FYFD

Tag: fluids as art

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    “Now I See – The Collection Vol. 2”

    In the next video of his current collection, Roman De Giuli takes us flying over liquid landscapes that look like our Earth in miniature. Many of them have the feeling of river deltas or glaciers. Sharp-eyed viewers will notice bubbles and flotsam in some of these streams. If you follow them, you can see how the flows vary — wiggling around islands, speeding up through constrictions and slowing down when the stream widens. It is, as always, a beautiful form of flow visualization. (Video and image credit: R. De Giuli)

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    “C R Y S T A L S”

    In “C R Y S T A L S,” filmmaker Thomas Blanchard captures the slow, inexorable growth of potassium phosphate crystals. He took over 150,000 images — one per minute — to document the way crystals formed as the originally transparent liquid evaporated. Some crystals branch into fractals. Others bulge outward like a condensing cloud or a sprouting mushroom. (Video and image credit: T. Blanchard)

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  • Stunning Interstellar Turbulence

    Stunning Interstellar Turbulence

    The space between stars, known as the interstellar medium, may be sparse, but it is far from empty. Gas, dust, and plasma in this region forms compressible magnetized turbulence, with some pockets moving supersonically and others moving slower than sound. The flows here influence how stars form, how cosmic rays spread, and where metals and other planetary building blocks wind up. To better understand the physics of this region, researchers built a numerical simulation with over 1,000 billion grid points, creating an unprecedentedly detailed picture of this turbulence.

    The images above are two-dimensional slices from the full 3D simulation. The upper image shows the current density while the lower one shows mass density. On the right side of the images, magnetic field lines are superimposed in white. The results are gorgeous. Can you imagine a fly-through video? (Image and research credit: J. Beattie et al.; via Gizmodo)

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    “Monsoon 7”

    Storm-chasing photographer Mike Olbinski (previously) returns with another stunning timelapse of summer thunderstorms in the western U.S. I never tire of watching the turbulent convection, microbursts, billowing haboobs, and undulating clouds Olbinski captures. His work is always a reminder of the incredible power and energy contained in our atmosphere and unleashed in cycles of warming and cooling, evaporation and condensation. (Video and image credit: M. Olbinski)

  • Flamingo Fluid Dynamics, Part 2: The Game’s a Foot

    Flamingo Fluid Dynamics, Part 2: The Game’s a Foot

    Yesterday we saw how hunting flamingos use their heads and beaks to draw out and trap various prey. Today we take another look at the same study, which shows that flamingos use their footwork, too. If you watch flamingos on a beach, in muddy waters, or in a shallow pool, you’ll see them shifting back and forth as they lift and lower their feet. In humans, we might attribute this to nervous energy, but it turns out it’s another flamingo hunting habit.

    A mechanical model of a flamingo's foot reveals how its stomping and shape change create a standing vortex.

    As a flamingo raises its foot, it draws its toes together; when it stomps down, its foot spreads outward. This morphing shape, researchers discovered, creates a standing vortex just ahead of its feet — right where it lowers its head to sample whatever hapless creatures it has caught in this swirling vortex. And the vortex, as shown below, is strong enough to trap even active swimmers, making the flamingo a hard hunter to escape. (Image credit: top – L. Yukai, others – V. Ortega-Jimenez et al.; research credit: V. Ortega-Jimenez et al.; submitted by Soh KY)

    Video showing how active swimmers can get caught in the flamingo's stomping vortex.
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    “Soap Bubble Bonanza

    This video offers an artistic look at a soap bubble bursting. The process is captured with high-speed video combined with schlieren photography, a technique that makes visible subtle density variations in the air. The bubbles all pop spontaneously, once enough of their cap drains or evaporates away for a hole to form. That hole retracts quickly; the acceleration of the liquid around the bubble’s spherical shape makes the retracting film break into droplets, seen as falling streaks near the bottom of the bubble. The retraction also affects air inside the bubble, making the air that touched the film curl up on itself, creating turbulence. Then, as the film completes its retraction, it pushes a plume of the once-interior air upward, as if the interior of the bubble is turning itself inside out. (Video and image credit: D. van Gils)

  • The Hidden Beauty in the Mundane

    The Hidden Beauty in the Mundane

    Physicist Sidney Nagel has spent his career on topics that are somewhat unexpected: how coffee stains form, how droplets splash — or don’t, and how fluid flows into viscous fingers. Often this means looking at the mechanics of everyday occurrences that we otherwise take for granted. Instead, Nagel probes carefully at things like a coffee stain, asking why it’s darker at the edges and what he could do to keep that from happening — all to ultimately uncover the forces and mechanisms at play. Quanta has a great little interview with him on this and other topics. Check it out here. (Image credit: S. Nagel and K. Norman; via Quanta)

    Images of droplets breaking off.
    Assorted "coffee-ring" stains, where particles collect toward the contact line along the circumference of the drop.
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    “Now I See – The Collection Vol. 1”

    On the heels of his behind-the-scenes introduction, here’s the first volume of artist Roman De Giuli’s “Now I See”. In it, we appear to soar above vast colorful landscapes. Rivers flow past islands. Glaciers creep along valleys. Canyons cut through deserts. It’s like a bird’s eye view of our planet’s terrestrial wonders. (Video and image credit: R. De Giuli)

  • “Spines”

    “Spines”

    Water droplets cling to spine-covered plant life in this series from photographer Tom Leighton. The hairs are hydrophobic — notice how spherical the drops appear. Many plants make parts of their leaves and stems hydrophobic in order to redirect water toward their roots, where it can be taken in. Others use hair-like awns to collect and draw in dew that supplements their water capture. (Image credit: T. Leighton; via Colossal)

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    Creating Liquid Landscapes

    Artist Roman De Giuli excels at creating what appear to be vast landscapes carved by moving water. In reality, these pieces are small-scale flows, created on paper. Now, De Giuli takes us behind the scenes to see how he creates these masterpieces — layering, washing, burning, and repeating to build up the paperscape that eventually hosts the flows we see recorded. The work is meticulous and slow, and the results are incredible. De Giuli’s videos never fail to transport me to a calmer, more pristine version of our world. I can’t wait to see the new series! (Video and image credit: R. De Giuli)

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