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Fluids such as water are Newtonian, and their viscous behavior is well understood. However, many common fluids are "viscoelastic." These fluids, such as those commonly found in cosmetics, soaps and paints, possess a combination ...
New research shows that it is not only the size, but the shape of a tube that determines whether a liquid will spill out of it when tipped over.
Water has an unusual property when it flows closely to some specially designed surfaces—its speed isn't equal to zero, even in the layer that directly touches the wall. This means that liquid doesn't adhere to the surface, ...
By carefully observing scenes as simple as leaves falling from trees or dandelion seeds blowing in the wind, we can see diverse "falling styles" that include tumbling, fluttering or spiraling.
Beneath the surface of rivers and streams, aquatic plants sway with the current, playing an unseen but vital role in the life of the waterway. Through a new series of experiments that model these underwater undulations, researchers ...
Researchers at the University of Connecticut have uncovered new information about how particles behave in our bloodstream, an important advancement that could help pharmaceutical scientists develop more effective cancer drugs.
Clinking your glass of beer often leaves its contents sloshing back and forth. Soon, though, the motion stops, your drink settles down, and you can take a sip without getting foam on your nose. It turns out that the foam ...
The spinning rainbow surface of a soap bubble is more than mesmerizing – it's a lesson in fluid mechanics. Better understanding of these hypnotic flows could bring improvements in many areas, from longer lasting beer foam ...
Understanding how smoke rings form and dissipate could lead to technology allowing airplanes to soar more efficiently and blood to flow more freely through the human heart.
During the 1990s, Charles S. Campbell, now a professor in the Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering at the University of Southern California, began exploring why large landslides flow great distances with apparently ...
When plaque, fatty deposits that build up on the inside of arteries, rupture and block blood flow, the results can be deadly. Such hardening of the arteries, also called atherosclerosis, typically leads to heart disease, ...
Sunscreen, laundry detergent, the can of paint you just picked up from the hardware store. What if we told you that your everyday liquid consumer products aren't just liquids—they're a complex blend of liquid and solid ...
The spreading of mixable liquids into 'droplet hats' was observed for the first time, which could lead to insight into improving strategies for cleaning animals affected by oil spills.
Moving through water can be a drag, but the use of supercavitation bubbles can reduce that drag and increase the speed of underwater vehicles. Sometimes these bubbles produce a bumpy ride, but now a team of engineers from ...
Look out over the ocean and you might get the impression that it's a mass of water acting as a single entity. However, the world's oceans are made up of layers of different densities, called stratifications, with complex ...
Researchers have uncovered key features of the dynamics of a form of jerky motion responsible for phenomena as diverse as squeaks and squeals in door hinges and automotive brakes, joint wear in the human body and the sudden ...
If you've ever eaten food while upside down - and who hasn't indulged this chimpanzee daydream? - you can thank the successive wave-like motions of peristalsis for keeping the chewed bolus down and ferrying it into your stomach. ...
In 1940, the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapsed in dramatic fashion, twisting in the wind before it snapped and plunged into the water below. As wind blew across the span, the flow induced oscillating sideways forces that helped ...
Recent research by a team led by Jonathan Cox and Zhijin Wang shows how water flows through the nose of a guitarfish, a type of ray. The team discovered that vortex-like structures in their noses help the guitarfish to swim ...
If you've ever experienced the exceptionally powerful and reverberating sounds of a jet during takeoff, you likely won't be surprised that the noise produced by jet engines is ranked among the loudest of human-generated noises.
If you go out after a rain, you may notice spider webs glistening with water droplets. The soggy webs resemble human-made meshes for fog collection: They both have thin fibers that collect water from droplets in the air.
Precise control of an individual particle or molecule is a difficult task. Controlling multiple particles simultaneously is an even more challenging endeavor. Researchers at the University of Illinois have developed a new ...
On an intuitive level, you'd expect a shark's skin to reduce drag. After all, the purpose of sharkskin-inspired riblets—the micro-grooved structures found in aircraft wings, wind turbine blades and Olympic-class swimsuits—is ...
Sailing history is rife with tales of monster-sized rogue waves—huge, towering walls of water that seemingly rise up from nothing to dwarf, then deluge, vessel and crew. Rogue waves can measure eight times higher than the ...
Here's some incentive to cover your mouth the next time you sneeze: New high-speed videos captured by MIT researchers show that as a person sneezes, they launch a sheet of fluid that balloons, then breaks apart in long filaments ...
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New research findings are yielding insights into the physics behind the swimming behavior of bacteria and spermatozoa that could lead to a better understanding of the mechanisms affecting fertility and formation of bacterial ...
Turbulent flows surround us, from complex cloud formations to rapidly flowing rivers. Populations of motile bacteria in liquid media can also exhibit patterns of collective motion that resemble turbulent flows, provided the ...
Swimming in a pool of syrup would be difficult for most people, but for bacteria like E. coli, it's easier than swimming in water. Scientists have known for decades that these cells move faster and farther in viscoelastic ...
Avalanching sand from dune faces in Death Valley National Park and the Mojave Desert can trigger loud, rumbling "booming" or short bursts of "burping" sounds—behaving as a perfectly tuned musical instrument.
(Phys.org)—A team of researchers from Austria, Germany and the U.K. has succeeded in building a model that shows the process that occurs when a liquid moves from a smooth state to one of turbulence inside of a pipe. In ...
(Phys.org)—A team of researchers with Université Paris-Sud and Université P.M. Curie/Université Paris-Diderot, both in France, has discovered that putting certain types of bacteria into an ordinary fluid, can cause it ...
Microspheres in a fluid, spinning in opposite directions, create flow patterns that affect other particles. Computer simulations show the particles self-assembling into different structures at different concentrations: bands, ...
New calculations by a theoretical astrophysicist at The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) provide tools that open a door to exploring the history of events in astrophysical flows and in plasma fusion devices described ...
The Leidenfrost effect is a strange phenomenon that allows water droplets to levitate and even climb uphill. Now physicists at the University of Bath have harnessed this quirk of physics to create a thermostat with no moving ...
When it comes to boiling water—or the phenomenon of applying heat to a liquid until it transitions to a gas—is there anything left for today's scientists to study? The surprising answer is, yes, quite a bit. How the bubbles ...
(Phys.org) —A trio of researches with Université Paris Diderot has found that viscoelastic fluids spontaneously form wings which in turn cause the formation of geometric shapes when the fluid is shot out of a jet at high ...
Sea monkeys have captured the popular attention of both children and aquarium hobbyists because of their easily observable life cycle—sold as dehydrated eggs, these tiny brine shrimp readily hatch, develop and mate given ...
Researchers at MIT have discovered a new way of harnessing temperature gradients in fluids to propel objects. In the natural world, the mechanism may influence the motion of icebergs floating on the sea and rocks moving through ...
(Phys.org) —In a basement lab on BYU's campus, mechanical engineering professor Julie Crockett analyzes water as it bounces like a ball and rolls down a ramp.
People standing on a beach often feel the water tugging the sand away from under their feet. This is the undertow, the current that pulls water back into the ocean after a wave breaks on the beach.
(Phys.org) —In a discovery that could eventually have implications for both health and industrial safety, researchers at Princeton University have found that common T-junction intersections in pipes can trap bubbles and ...
Animal flight behavior is an exciting frontier for engineers to both apply knowledge of aerodynamics and to learn from nature's solutions to operating in the air. Flying snakes are particularly intriguing to researchers because ...
(Phys.org) —From steel beams to plastic Lego bricks, building blocks come in many materials and all sizes. Today, science has opened the way to manufacturing at the nanoscale with biological materials. Potential applications ...
When you've got to go, but you're out there in space, zipped up in a spacesuit, with no toilet in sight and a crew of other astronauts around, what do you do?
We all know that when it rains, plants grow. When it doesn't, they don't.
In science, sometimes the best discoveries come when you're exploring something else entirely. That's the case with recent findings from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), where a research team has ...
Graphene, a two-dimensional form of carbon in sheets just one atom in thick, has been the subject of widespread research, in large part because of its unique combination of strength, electrical conductivity, and chemical ...
Every year, trade winds over the Sahara Desert sweep up huge plumes of mineral dust, transporting hundreds of teragrams—enough to fill 10 million dump trucks—across North Africa and over the Atlantic Ocean. This dust ...
The claws of coconut crabs have the strongest pinching force of any crustacean, according to a study published November 23, 2016 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Shin-ichiro Oka from Okinawa Churashima Foundation, Japan, ...
People have a remarkable ability to remember and recall events from the past, even when those events didn't hold any particular importance at the time they occurred. Now, researchers reporting in the journal Current Biology ...
"Mood ring materials" could play an important role in minimizing and mitigating damage to the nation's failing infrastructure.
A groundbreaking study of the virosphere of the most populous animals - those without backbones such as insects, spiders and worms and that live around our houses - has uncovered 1445 viruses, revealing people have only scratched ...
Reporting this week (Wednesday Nov. 23) in the journal Nature an international team led by British Antarctic Survey (BAS) explains that present-day thinning and retreat of Pine Island Glacier, one of the largest and fastest ...
A naturally occurring predatory bacterium is able to work with the immune system to clear multi-drug resistant Shigella infections in zebrafish, according to a study published today in Current Biology.
Piezoelectric sensors measure changes in pressure, acceleration, temperature, strain or force and are used in a vast array of devices important to everyday life. However, these sensors often can be limited by the "white noise" ...
The government wants smartphone makers to lock out most apps when the phone is being used by someone driving a car.
Scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have developed a vaccine that blocks the pain-numbing effects of the opioid drugs oxycodone (oxy) and hydrocodone (hydro) in animal models. The vaccine also appears to decrease ...
In the age of WikiLeaks, Russian hacks and increased government surveillance, many computer users are feeling increasingly worried about how best to protect their personal information—even if they aren't guarding state ...
Researchers have revealed new atomic-scale details about pesky deposits that can stop or slow chemical reactions vital to fuel production and other processes. This disruption to reactions is known as deactivation or poisoning.
A study co-led by the University of East Anglia (UEA) has found that people with genes for high educational achievement tend to marry, and have children with, people with similar DNA.
The study, published as the cover article in BioMed Central's Avian Research, led by the Earlham Institute and the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California, explores the phylogenetic relationship between ...
Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory are being credited with creating the first intermetallic double salt with platinum.
(Phys.org)—A team of researchers from France, the U.S. and Italy has found evidence from the Tohoku-Oki earthquake that sensors that measure changes in gravity might offer a way to warn people of impending disaster faster ...
A new analysis of subsistence data collected in three Arctic communities underscores the importance of social ties and sharing among households.
Despite what you might think, evolution rarely happens because something is good for a species. Instead, natural selection favours genetic variants that are good for the individuals that possess them. This leads to a much ...
(Phys.org)—A team of researchers with the Universities of Roehampton and Birmingham in the U.K. has found a unique way to measure the energy spent by tree-dwelling apes when faced with gaps in a jungle canopy. In their ...
Although recent election coverage may suggest otherwise, research shows that people are more likely to use positive words than negative words on the whole in their communications. Behavioral scientists have extensively documented ...
How can quantum information be stored as long as possible? An important step forward in the development of quantum memories has been achieved by a research team of TU Wien.
An enterprising researcher from The University of Manchester has developed a prototype tool that could help transform the lives of the blind and visually impaired.
It only takes a few seconds for an employee of one of the world's leading hacking companies to take a locked smartphone and pull the data from it.
Men and women don't communicate much differently from each other, at least when they get the same training and are working on the same type of written assignment. The findings come amid frequent studies that have discovered ...
Black light does more than make posters glow. Cornell researchers have developed a chemical tool to control inflammation that is activated by ultraviolet (UV) light.
Scientists at Washington University in St. Louis isolated an enzyme that controls the levels of two plant hormones simultaneously, linking the molecular pathways for growth and defense.
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