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 […]
When a person walks while carrying a full cup (with no lid) of coffee, it is almost inevitable that some coffee will spill. Two Ig Nobel Prizes have honored research that analyzed why. Small Expedition Room produced this video news report [in Korean] about the phenomenon: Those Two Coffee-Spill Ig Nobel Prizes The 2012 Ig […]
A round of surprise appears in a glass of beer—or a glass of coffee or tea—when you shake it stirringly. Details are in this study: “Counter-Rotation in an Orbitally Shaken Glass of Beer,” Frédéric Moisy, J. Bouvard, and Wietze Herreman [pictured below], EPL [Europhysics Letters], vol. 122, no. 3, no. 34002, 2018. The authors, at Université […]
Have you ever wondered why a hard-boiled egg, or a pool ball, spinning on a countertop and passing through a puddle of milk, draws milk up the side of the egg and then ejects it at the maximum radius? So did Ken Langley, Jeff Hendricks, Matthew Elverud, Dan Maynes and Tadd Truscott of Brigham Young […]
“It helps to imagine under what conditions a man would be swimming at, say, the same Reynolds number as his own sperm. Well you put him in a swimming pool that is full of molasses, and the you forbid him to move any pare of his body faster than 1 cm/min. Now imagine yourself in that condition; you’re under […]
Nicole Sharp explains, in FYFD, how sheep are, more or less, a fluid: Not all fluids are, well, fluid. Traffic, flocks of birds, ants, and even sheep can behave like fluids. This video shows an aerial perspective on sheep being herded, and despite the four-legged nature of these particles, they have a lot of fluid-like characteristics.… […]
Room 007 of the Love Building at Gatech, Atlanta, Georgia is the home of the Hoogle Lab. It’s run by David L. Hu (Assistant Professor of Fluid Mechanics) who is the corresponding author for the robotic jumping-beans study which Improbable recently profiled. But the Hoogle Lab doesn’t exclusively focus on jumping beans, it also investigates the […]
Aatish Bhatia (of Empirical Zeal) alerts us to an outpouring of soon-to-be-announced birth-centric and micturation-modulation fluid dynamics insights. Anne Staples [pictured here], of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, will chair a session on “Pumping Phenomenon“, at the American Physical Society’s 66th Annual Meeting of the APS Division of Fluid Dynamics,in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on Sunday, […]
Three male scientists (all of them humans) go to great lengths to demonstrate that females (at least if they are flies) can, should they want or need to, regard ejaculate as a dual-use fluid. Their study is: “Elucidating the function of ejaculate expulsion and consumption after copulation by female Euxesta bilimeki,” Christian Luis Rodriguez-Enriquez, Eduardo […]
We are, all of us, in a certain sense enjoying a steady flow of research reports about fluids. Here are two of the newest items: “Three coins in a fountain ,” H. K. Moffatt, Journal of Fluid Mechanics , Volume 720 , April 2013, pp 1 – 4. [doi: 10.1017/jfm.2013.55] (Thanks to investigator Tom Gill for […]