fuckyeahfluiddynamics

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Swimming Like a Ray

Manta rays are amazing and efficient swimmers -- a necessity for any large animal that survives on tiny plankton. Researchers have built a new soft robot inspired by swimming mantas.  (Image credit: J. Lanoy; video and research credit: H. Qing et al.; via Ars Technica) Read the full article

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The Mystery of the Binary Droplet

What goes on inside an evaporating droplet made up of more than one fluid? This is a perennially fascinating question with lots of permutations. (Video and image credit: P. Dekker et al.; research pre-print: C. Diddens et al.) Read the full article

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Within a Drop

In this macro video, various chemical reactions swirl inside a single dangling droplet. Despite its tiny size, quite a lot can go on in a drop like this. (Video and image credit: B. Pleyer; via Nikon Small World in Motion) Read the full article

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Why Icy Giants Have Strange Magnetic Fields

When Voyager 2 visited Uranus and Neptune, scientists were puzzled by the icy giants' disorderly magnetic fields. Contrary to expectations, neither planet had a well-defined north and south magnetic pole, indicating that the planets' thick, icy interiors must not convect the way Earth's mantle does. (Image credit: NASA; research credit: B. Militzer; via Physics World) Read the full article

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Blooming in Blue

Summers in the Barents Sea -- a shallow region off the northern coasts of Norway and Russia -- trigger phytoplankton blooms like the one in this satellite image.  (Image credit: W. Liang; via NASA Earth Observatory) Read the full article

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Tracking Coastal Sediment Loss

Shorelines rely on an influx of sediment to counter what's lost to erosion by waves and currents. But tracking that sediment flux is challenging in coastal regions where salt, waves, and storms batter delicate instruments. (Image credit: NASA; research credit: W. Teng et al.; via Eos) Read the full article

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Cavitation Near Soft Surfaces

Collapsing cavitation bubbles are sometimes used to break up kidney stones, and they may find other uses in medicine as well. Here, researchers investigate the collapse of laser-triggered cavitation bubbles near tissue-mimicking hydrogel.  (Image and video credit: D. Preso et al.) Read the full article

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Strata of Starlings

Starlings come together in groups of up to thousands of birds for the protection of numbers. These flocks form spellbinding, undulating masses known as murmurations, where the movement of individual starlings sends waves spreading from neighbor to neighbor through the group. One bird's effort to dodge a hawk triggers a giant, spreading ripple in the flock. (Image credit: K. Cooper; via Colossal) Read the full article

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Tracking Tonga's Boom

When the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano erupted in January 2022, its effects were felt -- and heard -- thousands of kilometers away. A new study analyzes crowdsourced data (largely from Aotearoa New Zealand) to estimate the audible impact of the eruption.  (Image credit: NASA; research credit: M. Clive et al.; via Gizmodo) Read the full article

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How Cooling Towers Work

Power plants (and other industrial settings) often need to cool water to control plant temperatures. This usually requires cooling towers like the iconic curved towers seen at nuclear power plants.  (Video and image credit: Practical Engineering) Read the full article

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A New Mantle Viscosity Shift

The rough picture of Earth's interior -- a crust, mantle, and core -- is well-known, but the details of its inner structure are more difficult to pin down. A recent study analyzed seismic wave data with a machine learning algorithm to identify regions of the mantle where waves slowed down.  (Image credit: NASA; research credit: K. O'Farrell and Y. Wang; via Eos) Read the full article

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Jets, Shocks, and a Windblown Cavity

As material collapses onto a protostar, these young stars often form stellar jets that point outward along their axis of rotation. Made up of plasma, these jets shoot into the surrounding material, their interactions creating bright parabolic cavities like the one seen here.  (Image credit: NASA/Hubble/ESA/J. Schmidt; via APOD) Read the full article

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"Flowing Kelp"

This CUPOTY-shortlisted photo by Sigfrido Zimmerman shows giant kelp drifting in the current. At the base of each blade is an inflated bladder that helps keep the algae buoyant.  (Image credit: S. Zimmerman/CUPOTY; via Colossal) Read the full article

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Holding Steady

Before a mammalian cell divides, the spindle -- a protein structure -- divides the cell's genetic material in two. As it does, the cytoplasm inside the cell forms a toroidal flow. (Image credit: top - ColiN00B, illustration - W. Liao and E. Lauga; research credit: W. Liao and E. Lauga; via APS Physics) Read the full article

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The Best of FYFD 2024

Welcome to another year and another look back at FYFD's most popular posts. (Image credits: dam - Practical Engineering, ants - C. Chen et al., supernova - NOIRLab, sprinkler - K. Wang et al., wave tank - L-P. Euvé et al., "Dew Point" - L. Clark, paint - M. Huisman et al., iceberg - D. Fox, flame trough - S. Mould, sign - B. Willen, comet - S. Li, light pillars - N. Liao, chair - MIT News, Faraday instability - G. Louis et al., prominence - A. Vanoni) Read the full article

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Tracking Ice Floes

To understand why some sea ice melts and other sea ice survives, researchers tracked millions of floes over decades.  (Image credit: D. Cantelli; research credit: P. Taylor et al.; via Eos) Read the full article

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Tar Pit, Sweet Tar Pit

The La Brea Tar Pits have delivered countless creatures to their doom over tens of thousands of years. But the sticky quagmire of the pits' natural asphalt is a comfy home to at least one animal: the petroleum fly. (Video and image credit: Deep Look) Read the full article