A lot can happen to a drop. That becomes evident as one reads this study, and even more evident if and as one tried to replicate the study: “Controlled Uniform Coating from the Interplay of Marangoni Flows and Surface-Adsorbed Macromolecules,” Hyoungsoo Kim, François Boulogne, Eujin Um, Ian Jacobi, Ernie Button, and Howard A. Stone, Physical […]
Some things can remind you about almost everything. (Jane Siberry demonstrated this with her song “Everything reminds me of my dog.”) Some ideas can explain specific physical patterns—patterns you can see around you if you start looking for them, patterns you can try to measure and ruthlessly compare with each other. And some of those […]
Can a cat be both a solid and a liquid? A physics paper explores this question, using a special number called the “Deborah number”. We explore that physics paper, in this week’s Improbable Research podcast. SUBSCRIBE on Play.it, iTunes, or Spotify to get a new episode every week, free. This week, Marc Abrahams teams up with fluid dynamicist Nicole Sharp, creator of FYFD, the […]
Elephants are big, and they get hot. Especially in Africa. Thus, from the elephant’s point of view, there’s sometimes an urgent necessity to dissipate excess heat. Some investigators have suggested that flapping their large ears (strictly, their ‘pinnae’) could provide a significant heat-loss mechanism. (e.g. Buss, I. O., and Estes, J. A., 1971, ‘The Functional […]
What psychological / philosophical concept might serve as a way to connect these two photos – featuring pole dancers and stockbrokers? One answer, a surprising one according to authors Karina Paludan Nielsen and Kristina Stockunaite (who recently participated in the MSocSc in Social Science in Service Management programme at Copenhagen Business School) is ‘Flow’ [for […]
The meeting on Física de sistemas fuera del equilibrio, on November 20, 2012 in Madrid, featured a talk by Iker Zurigel about sheep flowing through a bottleneck, a phenomenon which in some ways is like ketchup flowing through a bottleneck, and in some ways is not. Here’s the abstract (thanks to investigator Mason Porter and colleagues for […]