On arid coastlines, fog rolling in can serve as an important water source. Today’s fog collectors often use tight mesh nets. The narrow holes help catch tiny water particles, but Keep reading
Tag: surface tension
How Insects Fly in the Rain
Getting caught in the rain is annoying for us but has the potential to be deadly for smaller creatures like insects. So how do they survive a deluge? First, they Keep reading
“Legend”
Filmmaker Roman De Giuli returns to his roots with this short fluid-filled film inspired by the color gold. He combines paint, ink, powders, and particles in a mix of micro- Keep reading
Explosively Jetting
Dropping water from a plastic pipette onto a pool of oil electrically charges the drop. Then, as it evaporates, it shrinks and concentrates the charges closer and closer. Eventually, the Keep reading
Flow Behind Viscous Fingers
Nature is full of branching patterns: trees, lighting, rivers, and more. In fluid dynamics, our prototypical branching pattern is the Saffman-Taylor instability, created when a less viscous fluid is injected Keep reading
The Mystery of the Binary Droplet
What goes on inside an evaporating droplet made up of more than one fluid? This is a perennially fascinating question with lots of permutations. In this one, researchers observed water-poor Keep reading
Within a Drop
In this macro video, various chemical reactions swirl inside a single dangling droplet. Despite its tiny size, quite a lot can go on in a drop like this. Both the Keep reading
Active Cheerios Self-Propel
The interface where air and water meet is a special world of surface-tension-mediated interactions. Cereal lovers are well-aware of the Cheerios effect, where lightweight O’s tend to attract one another, Keep reading
Predicting Droplet Sizes
Squeeze a bottle of cleaning spray, and the nozzle transforms a liquid jet into a spray of droplets. These droplets come in many sizes, and predicting them is difficult because Keep reading
“Chemical Somnia”
Under a macro lens, even a petri dish worth of fluids comes vividly to life. Here, artist Scott Portingale explores crystallization, Marangoni effects, and other phenomena alongside a haunting soundtrack Keep reading