Since 1938, every ball in Major League Baseball has been covered in a special “rubbing mud” harvested from a secret location in New Jersey. Although the league has tried in Keep reading
Tag: shear-thinning
“One”
A 4-minute, unedited one-shot video of colorful paint sliding down a sheet? Yes, please. Beautiful visuals aside, there are some really interesting physics involved here. It’s unclear whether the there’s Keep reading
Building In a Stingless Hive
Honeybees, with their stingers, get lots of attention, but the Americas have plenty of stinger-less honeymakers, too. These stingless bees are native to Mexico, where beekeepers cultivate them for pollination. Keep reading
Saving Screens with Shear-Thinning Fluids
These days glass screens travel with us everywhere, and they can take some big hits on the way. Manufacturers have made tougher glass, but they continue to look for ways Keep reading
Evolving Fingers
If you sandwich a viscous fluid between two plates and inject a less viscous fluid, you’ll get viscous fingers that spread and split as they grow. This research poster depicts Keep reading
Dendritic Painting Physics
In the art of Akiko Nakayama, colors branch and split in a tree-like pattern. In studying the process, researchers found the physics intersected art, soft matter mechanics, and statistical physics. Keep reading
A Toad’s Sticky Saliva
Frogs and toads shoot out their tongues to capture and envelop their prey in a fraction of a second. They owe their success in this area to two features: the Keep reading
A Look at Hagfish
Hagfish are the lords of slime. Their viscoelastic protection mechanism is so effective that they’ve hardly changed up their game in the past 300 million years. Instead, at the first Keep reading
Finger Painting Physics
Spreading paint with a brush or with fingers is familiar activity for most people. It’s also similar to processes used in industry for spreading thin layers of paint and other Keep reading
Studying Active Polymers Using Worms
I’ve covered some odd studies in my time, but this might be the strangest: to understand how active polymers affect viscosity, researchers loaded drunk worms into a rheometer. Active polymers Keep reading