Place a rigid ball on a hard vertical surface, and it will free fall. Stick a liquid drop there, and it will slide down. But researchers discovered that with a Keep reading
Tag: solid mechanics
Chaotic Hose Instability
Steve Mould is back with another video looking at wild fluid behaviors. This time he’s considering hose instabilities like the one that makes a water-carrying hose beyond a certain length Keep reading
Ultra-Soft Solids Flow By Turning Inside Out
Can a solid flow? What would that even look like? Researchers explored these questions with an ultra-soft gel (think 100,000 times softer than a gummy bear) pumped through a ring-shaped 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
Unsticking in Jumps
Soft materials tend to be sticky, and once they’re adhered to a surface, they’re often harder to remove than they were to attach — think of Scotch tape stuck to Keep reading
Kirigami Parachutes
To fly stably, parachutes need to deform and allow some air to pass through their canopy. In this video, researchers investigate kirigimi parachutes, inspired by a form of paper art Keep reading
Why Inkjet Paper Curls
Printed pages from inkjet printers tends to curl up over time. Researchers found that this long-term curl correlates with the migration of glycerol — one of the solvents used in Keep reading
Bending in Bubbles
Inside a cavity with a square cross-section, bubbles form an array. The shapes of their edges are determined by surface tension and capillarity (lower half of center image). Adding an Keep reading
Rain-Driven Prey Capture
Pitcher plants often entice their insect victims with sweet nectar before trapping them in inescapable viscoelastic goo. But some species go even further. Nepenthes gracilis, a species native to Southeast Keep reading
Squishy Actuators
Hard materials don’t always work well in robotics. Here, researchers build soft actuators that can bend, curl, and tighten in order to manipulate objects. They begin by injecting liquid elastomer Keep reading