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
Tag: viscosity
Evolving Fingers
If you sandwich a viscous fluid between two plates and inject a less viscous fluid, you’ll get viscous fingers that spread and split as they grow. This research poster depicts Keep reading
Weathering Spilled Oil
As long as we continue to extract and transport oil, marine oil spills will continue to be a problem. Recent work shows that spilled oil weathers differently depending on both Keep reading
Can Water Solve a Maze?
Inspired by a simulation, Steve Mould asks a great question in this video: can water solve a maze? Yes — with some caveats. Steve makes two different maze patterns — Keep reading
Finger Painting Physics
Spreading paint with a brush or with fingers is familiar activity for most people. It’s also similar to processes used in industry for spreading thin layers of paint and other Keep reading
Bubbles in Turbulence
In nature and industry, swarms of bubbles* often encounter turbulence in their surrounding fluid. To study this situation, researchers used numerical simulation to observe bubbles across a range of density, Keep reading
Viscosity and Quantum Mechanics
Viscosity describes a fluid’s resistance to changing its shape. Like surface tension, it’s a fundamental property of a fluid that comes from the interactions between molecules. But viscosity is a Keep reading
Swapping Emulsions
Chemically speaking, oil and water don’t mix. But with a little fluid mechanical effort, it’s possible to make them an emulsion — a mixture of oil droplets in water or Keep reading
Particle-filled Splashes
Adding particles to a liquid can significantly alter its splash dynamics, as shown in this new study. In the first image, a purely-liquid droplet spreads on impact into a thin Keep reading
Studying Active Polymers Using Worms
I’ve covered some odd studies in my time, but this might be the strangest: to understand how active polymers affect viscosity, researchers loaded drunk worms into a rheometer. Active polymers Keep reading