Like footballs and baseballs, the trajectory of a volleyball is strongly influenced by aerodynamics. When spinning, the ball experiences a difference in pressure on either side, which causes it to swerve, per the Magnus Keep reading
Tag: surface roughness
How Animals Stay Dry in the Rain
Getting wet can be a problem for many animals. A wet insect could quickly become too heavy to fly, and a wet bird can struggle to stay warm. But these Keep reading
Sliding Foams
What happens when a foam interacts with a sliding surface? That’s the question at the heart of this study, which finds three major regimes of foam-surface interaction. On smooth surfaces Keep reading
Rattlesnakes Sip Rain From Their Scales
Getting enough water in arid climates can be tough, but Western diamondback rattlesnakes have a secret weapon: their scales. During rain, sleet, and even snow, these rattlesnakes venture out of Keep reading
Jumping Droplets
From butterfly wings to lotus leaves, many surfaces in nature are shaped to repel water. This typically means roughness on the scale of tens of nanometers, which helps trap air Keep reading
The Coexistence of Order and Chaos
One of the great challenges in fluid dynamics is understanding how order gives way to chaos. Initially smooth and laminar flows often become disordered and turbulent. This video explores that Keep reading
Eroding Candy
When you pop a hard candy in your mouth, you probably don’t give much thought to the fluid dynamics involved in dissolving it. The series above shows a hard candy Keep reading
Superhydrophobic Coatings
Superhydrophobic–or water repellent–materials are much sought after. Their remarkable ability to shed water is actually mechanical in nature–not chemical. Surfaces with a highly textured microstructure, like a lotus leaf or Keep reading
Denticles and Sharkskin
Look closely enough at a shark’s skin, and you will find it is covered in tiny, anvil-shaped denticles (lower left). To try and discover how and why these denticles help Keep reading
How Patterns Repel Water
Superhydrophobic surfaces repel water. Both naturally occurring and manmade materials with this property share a common feature: micro- or nanoscale structures on their surface. Lotus and lily leaves are coated Keep reading