The splash of a drop impacting a surface depends on many factors — among them droplet speed and size, air pressure, and surface characteristics. In this award-winning video from the Keep reading
Tag: science
Superman’s Hair Gel
I love a good tongue-in-cheek physical analysis of superheroes. This estimate of the drag force experienced by Superman’s hair when outracing a plane or speeding bullet was done by Cornell Keep reading
A Dance of Hydrogen Bubbles
Hydrogen bubbles rise off zinc submerged in hydrocholoric acid in this short film from the Beauty of Science team. In high-speed video, the rise of the bubbles is stately and Keep reading
Tapping a Can Won’t Save Your Beer
It happens to the best of us: sometimes our beer gets shaken up during transit. One common reaction to this is to tap the side of the can repeatedly before Keep reading
The Physics of Al Dente
It’s a simple weeknight routine: toss a handful of spaghetti noodles in boiling water, wait a few minutes, and enjoy with the sauce of your choice. But there’s a surprising Keep reading
Swinging Jets
In the tiny realm of microfluidics, flows are, in general, completely laminar. That makes mixing a challenge. But it turns out that pumping water steadily into multiple inlets can spontaneously Keep reading
River Avon
One of the challenges in fluid dynamics is considering the instantaneous versus the average. Many flows — especially turbulent ones — are different at every point in space and in Keep reading
Flowery Splashes
Plunge a disk into water and you’ll get a dome-like splash that closes back on itself. But what happens when that disk has a patterned surface? In this video, researchers Keep reading
Testing Waves in High Gravity
Where waves crash and meet, turbulence is inevitable. But exactly how large waves interact — whether in the ocean, in plasma, or the atmosphere — is far from understood. A Keep reading
Spinning Ink Out of Markers
I have to say I’m grateful that my classmates in school never discovered the mess-generating superpower of felt-tipped markers. As the Slow Mo Guys demonstrate here, when you spin or Keep reading