FYFD

Artist Thomas Blanchard likes to create wild visuals from a mixture of mundane ingredients like ink, soap, oils, and ferrofluids. In this latest video, he’s mixed chemical reactions and physical phenomena into something reminiscent of a god’s eye staring across time and space, creation and destruction. (Video and image credit: T. Blanchard)

In the past few decades, our knowledge of exoplanets has exploded, but we’re still relatively limited in what we can learn about these worlds. That’s due, in large part, to the indirect way we observe them. Most exoplanets are found when we see them transit, passing between Earth and their star. During a transit, the […]

The concrete that makes up so much of our world is usually local in origin. To keep costs low, engineers use locally-sourced ingredients to make it. But not all ingredients perform the same. In the decades since concrete’s widespread adoption, engineers have discovered that some components in the concrete are prone to chemical reactions that […]

From oil drums to–yes–soda cans, liquid-filled cylindrical shells are everywhere. And, it turns out, these structures fail differently than empty shells or ones filled with a solid. Liquid-filled cylinders buckle in sequential rings, as seen in the video below. Researchers found that the buckling resulted from the shell softening and re-stiffening under the compressive load–repe…

Ocean sprays, coughs, and sneezes are just a few of the ways that droplets full of bacteria and salt can get aloft on a breeze. How do these bacteria stay viable even as their droplet evaporates? That’s the question behind this video’s research. When a bacteria-laden droplet or a salt-laden droplet dries, the evaporating droplet’s […]

We’re terribly spoiled these days when it comes to footage of lava and volcanic eruptions. Back when I started FYFD, I could find very few decent photos of lava flows to illustrate posts. And now, thanks to drone cameras, we have a glut of absolutely gorgeous footage of flowing lava. This particular example comes from […]

Under the cold temperatures and immense pressures of a glacier, ice does not always behave in ways we’d expect. For example, cutting through ice using the pressure of a weighted wire does not break an ice block in two; as the wire passes through the ice, the melted water refreezes in its wake, leaving an […]

Sprinklers have long been the go-to fire protection for commercial properties and some residences. Dousing a fire in water not only puts out the flames but cools the surroundings and helps prevent reignition. But it requires complicated infrastructure and can damage buildings and their contents. Back in 2015, students were experimenting with an alternative fire […]

Dolphins are such fast and agile swimmers that, naturally, scientists have long wanted to understand how they swim so well. A recent study draws on numerical simulation to analyze the flow a dolphin creates when flapping its tail. The resulting flow is highly turbulent–researchers were only able to simulate up to a fraction of a […]

Supersonic flight over the U.S. has been banned by all non-military aircraft for more than fifty years. The ban gained momentum in the 1960s after test programs over St. Louis and Oklahoma provoked public outcry. But NASA’s X-59 aircraft is working to lift the ban by softening the sonic booms that encouraged the ban in […]

Seaweed sways in the surf in this photograph by Billy Arthur. I always love how waves look like a stormy sky when viewed from below. This image is extra neat because of the contrast with the sunbeams shining through the still surface on the right side of the image. Sun and storm on the verge […]

Traditional weather forecasting models are physics-based and rely on supercomputers. Practically speaking, this means that they start from the basic governing equations (like the Navier-Stokes equations) and use approximations to model aspects of the problem in order to make the physics solvable, given constraints on time, computational power, spatial resolution, and so on. So-called AI […]

Beginning in early spring, brilliant blue ponds form on Greenland’s ice sheets as meltwater gathers in indentations. This satellite image shows the ice east of Nordenskiöld Glacier, which is the tongue of ice projecting on the left side of the image. The center region of ice is darker, marked by soot, ash, and dirt left […]

People have long hoped to reliably predict volcanic eruptions. An automated system at Piton de la Fournaise in France has been doing so since 2014 with an impressive 92% accuracy. The tool, called Jerk, makes its predictions based on real-time measurements of subtle ground movements associated with magma fracturing rock on its way to the […]

From mid-February to early May, tiny silvery Pacific herring gather along the shallow coastlines of Vancouver Island off British Columbia, Canada. In these sheltered waters, they spawn; female fish produce sticky eggs and males flood the area with milt, which turns the water a milky turquoise or green. The colors can be so vivid that […]

Photographer Lisa K. Kuhn captured a spectacular lenticular cloud over Mount Shasta in this image from the Sony World Photography Awards. These lens-shaped clouds occur most often near mountains and other terrain that forces air to flow up and over it. As the air cools, water condenses out, forming the cloud. When the air flows […]

When the wind blows, trees shift and sway, reconfiguring their shape and their leaves in response. For parts of the year, that flow can also pluck pollen grains off the tree, carrying them on the winds. A new computational simulation models this pollen dispersal from a tree, with the aim of eventually integrating into a […]

A tiger skin cake forms a distinctive pattern of light and dark patches as it bakes. Its current popularity seems to have expanded outward from China; I found a lot of Swiss-roll-style recipes that use it as an outer wrapper. Here, researchers look at how the wrinkled surface forms. The viscous batter quickly forms a […]

On Earth, most waves form when wind blows across the water. The shear and added energy from the wind ripples the surface, eventually building up waves (through the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability). The same process should happen anywhere else where wind and open liquid surfaces meet–even on other planets. To explore this, researchers built a new model, […]

When supersonic jets get emitted into rarefied air, they behave differently than they do in regular atmospheric conditions. Here, researchers picture three different configurations these jets can take. In the top image, the jets are close enough together that they appear to merge into a narrow supersonic jet. In the middle image, the jets are […]