In nature — from atoms to human crowds — two groups moving in opposite directions often spontaneously organize into interwoven lanes flowing in their respective directions. Now researchers have built Keep reading
Tag: traffic
Traffic Flow and Phantom Jams
We’ve all experienced the frustration of traffic jams that seem to come from nowhere — standstills that occur with no accident, construction, or obstacle in sight. Traffic shares a lot Keep reading
Collective Motion: Crowds
It’s sometimes taken for granted that, in groups, people can behave a lot like a fluid or a granular material. This allows scientists to adapt models developed for those materials Keep reading
Collective Motion: Intro
Herds, flocks, schools, and even crowds can behave in fluid-like ways. On Science Friday, Stanford professor Nicholas Ouellette explains some of the physics behind these similarities. Fluids are, after all, Keep reading
Ants Avoid Traffic Jams by Giving Up
Both ants and traffic are well-connected to fluid dynamics, even if they are not, strictly speaking, fluids. As it happens, ant traffic has interesting implications not only for human transit Keep reading
Huddling Penguins and Traffic Jams
Male emperor penguins have the unenviable task of incubating their eggs in temperatures as cold as -50 deg Celsius and winds of up to 200 km/h. To stay warm, the Keep reading
Fluids Round-up – 16 November 2013
Time for another fluids round-up. Here are your links: PhysicsBuzz takes a look at the use of plasma actuators to control airflow. Over at Deep Sea News, you can learn about parasitic Keep reading
Traffic Fluid Dynamics
What does traffic have to do with fluid dynamics? Rather a lot, actually! Many parallels exist between traffic and compressible fluid flow. One such example, the concept of a shock Keep reading