Bursting bubbles enhance our drinks, seed our clouds, and affect our health. Because these bubbles are so small, they’re easily affected by changes at the interface, like surfactants, Marangoni effects, Keep reading
Tag: viscoelasticity
Fishing With Mucus
The scaled wormsnail isn’t much for travel. It lives its whole life cemented to a rock in the tidal lands. And when you can’t go out for food, you have Keep reading
Forming Zigzags
Scientists are fascinated by the organized patterns that can emerge from non-living systems. Here, researchers study micron-sized magnetic particles, immersed in a viscoelastic fluid and subjected to an oscillating magnetic 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
A Fractal Raft From a Spinning Top
File this one under Cool Things I Would Have Never Thought Of. In this video, researchers play around with the flow around a spinning top and end up creating a Keep reading
Liquid-in-Liquid Printing
With 3D printing and other recent technologies, manufacturing options are always in flux. Here, researchers explore a method for printing a liquid inside of a liquid. Their materials are specially 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
Spinning Tops
What does the flow look like around a spinning top? Here, researchers used dye to visualize what happens in a Newtonian fluid (like air or water) as well as a Keep reading
Elastic Turbulence
Decades ago, engineers pumping polymer-filled drilling liquids into porous rock noticed sudden and dramatic increases in the viscosity of the liquid. Within the tiny pores of the rock, conventional (i.e., Keep reading