A few years ago, the Internet was abuzz with water bottle flips. Experimentalists are still looking at how they can arrest a partially fluid-filled container’s bounce, but now they’re rotating Keep reading
Tag: jets
Oil-Covered Bubbles Popping
When bubbles burst, they release smaller droplets from the jet that rebounds upward. Depending on their size, these droplets can fall back down or get lofted upward on air currents Keep reading
A Starry Nursery
This mountain of interstellar gas and dust lies in the picturesque Eagle Nebula. Though it appears solid in this near-infrared image from JWST, the density of the structure is actually Keep reading
Toilet Plumes
Toilet flushes are gross. We’ve seen it before, though not in the same detail as this study. Here, researchers illuminate the spray from the flush of a typical commercial toilet, Keep reading
Draining a Bottle
Turn a bottle upside-down to empty it, and you’ll hear a loud glug-glug-glug as the liquid in the bottle empties and air rushes in. In this video, researchers aim a Keep reading
Airflow in the Opera
Like so many other performers, the singers and musicians of New York’s Metropolitan Opera House were left without a way to safely perform when the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic began in early Keep reading
Eroding Grains
When a spacecraft comes in for a landing (or a tag similar to what OSIRIS-REx did), there’s a turbulent jet that points straight into a bed of particles. How those Keep reading
Contactless Bending
Using electromagnetism, researchers are bending and shaping soft liquid wires even against gravity. The team used galinstan — an alloy of gallium, indium, and tin that remains liquid at room Keep reading
Whistle Physics
Ever wondered how whistles work? Depending on the type of whistle, there are a few different phenomena in play, but the most fundamental one is the oscillation of a fast-moving Keep reading
Laser-Induced Jet Break-Up
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