A falling stream of water will naturally break up into droplets via the Plateau-Rayleigh instability. Those droplets are random, unless something like vibration of the nozzle sets their size. In Keep reading
Tag: instability
Where Wind Meets Water
That the wind causes ocean waves is obvious to anyone who has spent time near the water, but the details of that process remain fuzzy. Many of the explanations — Keep reading
How To: Ink Flow Photography
Ever wanted to try your hand at making these cool billowing ink photos? Photographer Jason Parnell-Brookes has a detailed tutorial over at PetaPixel laying out the necessary tools and set-up. Keep reading
Breaking Compound Ligaments
When pulled, viscous liquids stretch into ligaments that thin and then break into droplets. In this video, researchers investigate how these ligaments break up, depending on their composition. The initial Keep reading
The Bubbly Escape
Sometimes experiments don’t work as planned and, instead of answers, they lead to more questions. In this video, we see an experiment looking at an air bubble trapped beneath a Keep reading
Falling Pancake Drops
Despite their round appearance, the droplets you see here are actually shaped like little pancakes. They’re sandwiched inside a Hele-Shaw cell, essentially two plates with a viscous fluid between them. Keep reading
Paint Spinning
In a return to their roots, this Slow Mo Guys video features paint flowing on (and off!) a spinning disk. To help us see what’s going on, Gav uses a Keep reading
Solid, Liquid, Both?
Materials like oobleck — a suspension of cornstarch particles in water — are tough to classify. In some circumstances, they behave like a fluid, but in others, they act like Keep reading
Superfluid Instabilities
Superfluids — like Bose-Einstein condensates — are bizarre compared to fluids from our everyday experience because they have no viscosity. Without viscosity, it’s no surprise that they behave in unusual Keep reading
The Noisy Gluggle Jug
The fish-shaped Gluggle Jug makes an impressive set of sounds when tilted for pouring. Steve Mould explores their origin in this video. When liquid is poured from a container, air Keep reading