The featherwing beetle is tiny, less than half a millimeter in length. At that scale, flying is a challenge, with air’s viscosity dominating the forces the insect must overcome. The Keep reading
Tag: low Reynolds number flow
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
Artificial Microswimmers
Tiny organisms swim through a world much more viscous than ours. To do so, they swim asymmetrically, often using wave-like motions of tiny, hair-like cilia along their bodies. Mimicking this Keep reading
The Challenges of Being Small
For juvenile fish, feeding is a challenge. Their small size — often less than 5 mm in length — makes hydrodynamically capturing prey much harder because of viscosity’s relatively larger Keep reading
The Microscopic Ocean
When you’re the size of plankton, water may as well be molasses. Viscosity rules at these scales, and swimming plankton leave distinctive wakes that are slow to dissipate. Fish that feed on plankton use Keep reading
Escaping the Limits of Viscosity
For large creatures, it’s not hard to feel the evidence of someone else swimming nearby. But to tiny swimmers water is incredibly viscous and hard to move. These creatures have Keep reading
Communication Between Microswimmers
The elongated cells of Spirostomum ambiguum swim using hair-like cilia, but when threatened, the cells contract violently, sending out long-range hydrodynamic waves, like those visualized above. Along with these waves, the Keep reading
Magma Mixing
Magmas typically consist of a mixture of molten liquid, bubbles, and solid crystals. As they mix, those crystals can sink from one viscous layer into another. To investigate this sort Keep reading
Fighting a Viscous World
Vaucheria is a genus of yellow-green algae (think pond scum), and some species within this genus reproduce asexually by releasing zoospores. Once mature, the zoospore has to squeeze out of a Keep reading
Swimming Like a Balloon
For humans, swimming is relatively easy. Kick your legs, wheel your arms, and you’ll move forward. But for microswimmers, swimming can be more complicated. For them, the world is a Keep reading