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Watch: Underwater Robots based on the Loch Ness Monster

Current underwater vehicles are either difficult to manoeuvre making them unsuitable for sensitive work, or are extremely expensive. Gabe Weymouth and his team at the University of Southampton are designing new underwater robots based on the Plesiosaur – the dinosaur behind the legend of the Loch Ness Monster – which are much smaller, cheaper and more energy efficient.…

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Watch: How Do Snakes Catch Their Prey Underwater?

When catching prey underwater snakes use two main techniques: the frontal strike and the lateral strike. By studying real snakes in the lab at ESPCI/MNHN, Marion Segall was able to recreate the setup using a 3D-printed snake head and laser visualisation techniques, which allowed for the forces involved in each strike to be measured.…

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Watch: Tracking Beetles using the Sound of their Wings

The Coconut Rhinoceros Beetle is an invasive species that if left alone would decimate citrus crops across California. To prevent this from happening, John Allen and his team at the University of Hawai’i have been working to hunt the insects down before they are able to reach the West Coast of the USA.…

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Watch: How to Reduce Drag when Cycling

Cyclists can use up to 90% of their energy overcoming drag, which was the motivation behind the work of Ivaylo Nedyalkov at the University of New Hampshire, who was able to measure the force on each individual cyclist in a train formation to determine the best position to reduce your overall drag.…

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Watch: Levitating Objects on an Air Table

Air-tables create a thin film of air capable of supporting objects and causing them to levitate. By adding grooves to the table or the object, Professor John Hinch at the University of Cambridge was able to control the objects motion and describe the resultant acceleration in terms of a simple scaling relationship involving gravity and the aspect ratio.…

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Watch: How do Bubbles Freeze?

Freezing bubbles are not only beautiful, but also demonstrate incredibly complex physics. Here, Professor Jonathan Boreyko explains how bubbles freeze with examples of slow motion videos filmed in his laboratory at Virginia Tech.…

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Watch: How Strong is an Avalanche?

Measuring the forces present in an avalanche using light. Amalia Thomas from the University of Cambridge explains how to measure the forces between colliding particles in an avalanche based on their photo-elastic response and refractive index.

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Watch: Brazil Nut Effect in Avalanches and Cereal

The brazil nut effect describes the movement of large particles to the top of a container after shaking. The same effect also occurs in avalanches where large blocks of ice and rocks are seen on the surface, and in a box of cereal where the large pieces migrate to the top and the smaller dusty particles remain at the bottom.

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Watch: How does stone skipping work?

By bouncing elastic spheres across the surface of Bear Lake in Utah, researchers have discovered the physics behind stone skipping. The mechanism of ‘water walking’ occurs when a deformed sphere rotates continuously across the surface of the water giving the appearance that the sphere is literally walking on water.…

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Tornadoes, Fire and Ice

Listening to tornadoes to increase warning times and save lives, studying the effect of ice on the combustion of oil spills, and investigating how sea ice affects our climate – discover the latest research in Fluid Dynamics.…

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Bees, Squid and Oil Plumes

Spring has almost sprung which means we’re taking a look at the fluid dynamics of bees, how to build squid-inspired robots and modelling oil plumes eight years on from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.…

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