Fractured artificial rock helps crack a 54-year-old mystery

Princeton researchers have solved a 54-year-old puzzle about why certain fluids strangely slow down under pressure when flowing through porous materials, such as soils and sedimentary rocks. The findings could help improve ...

Wash your hands for 20 seconds: Physics shows why

Though hand-washing is proven effective in combating the spread of disease and infection, the physics behind it has rarely been studied. But in Physics of Fluids, researchers from Hammond Consulting Limited describe a simple ...

A new way to identify stresses in complex fluids

Fluid dynamics researchers use many techniques to study turbulent flows like ocean currents, or the swirling atmosphere of other planets. Arezoo Adrekani's team has discovered that a mathematical construct used in these fields ...

Writing in water using an ion-exchange bead as a pen

Writing is an age-old cultural technique. Thousands of years ago, humans were already carving signs and symbols into stone slabs. Scripts have become far more sophisticated since then but one aspect remains the same: Whether ...

Mathematicians model fluids at the mesoscale

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 ...

What physicists can learn from shark intestines

In 1920, inventor Nikola Tesla patented a type of pipe that he called a "valvular conduit," which was built to draw fluid in one direction without any moving parts or added energy, and has applications ranging from soft robotics ...

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