Backswimmers rule the surface of ponds, streams, and other bodies of water. These insects spend much of their time clinging just beneath the air-water interface, where they hunt larvae and Keep reading
Tag: propulsion
Pop-Pop Boats
I confess I’ve never heard of the pop-pop boat toys Steve Mould uses in this video. They feature a tank filled with water and a small source of heat in Keep reading
Coke and Butane Rockets
Rocket science has a reputation for being an incredibly difficult subject. But while there’s complexity in the execution, the concept behind rockets is pretty simple: throw mass out the back Keep reading
Nautilus Swimming
The shellbound chambered nautilus is a champion of underwater jet propulsion. It can eke out efficiencies as high as 75%, far outclassing other jet-based swimmers like squid, salps, and jellyfish. Keep reading
Living Fluid Dynamics
This short film for the 2016 Gallery of Fluid Motion features Montana State University students experiencing fluid dynamics in the classroom and in their daily lives. As in her previous Keep reading
These Invertibrates May Help Robots Swim
New FYFD video! Learn all about salps, vortex rings, and underwater robots. Thanasi Athanassiadis takes me inside his lab and his newly published research into how proximity affects the thrust Keep reading
Surface-Tension Supported Walkers
Nature’s smallest water-walkers use surface tension to keep themselves afloat. This includes hundreds of species of invertebrates like insects and spiders as well as the occasional extremely tiny vertebrate, like Keep reading
Turbojet Engines
[original media no longer available] GE has a great new video with a straightforward explanation of the turbojet and the turbofan engines. The simplest description of the engines–suck, squeeze, bang, Keep reading
Ferrofluid Thrusters
Ferrofluids–magnetically-sensitive fluids made up of a carrier liquid and ferrous nanoparticles–may soon have a new application as a miniature thruster on nanosatellites. Microspray thrusters use tiny hollow needles to electrically Keep reading
How Scramjets Work
The scramjet–supersonic combustion ramjet–engine has been a holy grail of aerospace engineering for 50 years. It is an air-breathing engine with no moving parts capable of propelling crafts at hypersonic Keep reading