Watch: Ventilation and COVID-19
Experiments visualising the airflow when breathing, speaking and laughing, show that wearing a mask indoors can drastically reduce the risk of transmission of airborne particles.…
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UK Fluids Network
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Watch: How do Sperm Swim?
The tail (flagellum) of the sperm does not simply push the body, but uses a rhythmical beating with pushing and fraying over a 4-beat pattern, as demonstrated in the video.…
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Watch: How do Birds Fly in Strong Winds?
When navigating strong crosswinds birds adjust the angle of their body into the wind, whilst keeping their head fixed on the target destination, in order to maintain forwards motion.…
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Watch: How do Cloaking Devices Work?
When an object, such as an aircraft or submarine, moves through a fluid it generates a ‘wake’ behind it which can be used by monitoring tools to detect its size and position.…
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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: How is Toothpaste made?
The manufacturing process for toothpaste involves mixing together several fluid and solid components to create the non-Newtonian polymer used to clean your teeth.…
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Watch: Natural Ventilation of Termite Mounds
Termites live underground in termite mounds to protect themselves from the heat of the desert, but how do they keep their mounds cool?…
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Watch: Listening to Tornadoes
Before a tornado forms the pressure drop at the centre emits a dull tone at 5-10Hz which can be detected hours before it becomes dangerous.…
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Watch: Spike Waves, Rogue Waves, and Hokusai’s Great Wave off Kanagawa
Rogue Waves occur when a larger wave appears in a group of smaller waves. In some circumstances these can lead to an exaggerated ‘Spike Wave’, or a crashing wave resembling the Great Wave off Kanagawa by Hokusai.…
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Watch: Smelling Underwater with the Star-Nosed Mole
Star-nosed moles are able to smell underwater by quickly exhaling and re-inhaling air bubbles as they search for prey. The bubbles are trapped close to the moles nostrils by a ring of tiny pink tentacles, which gives rise to the name ‘star-nosed’.…
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Watch: How do Jellyfish Sting?
Jellyfish stingers reach an acceleration 50 times faster than that of a bullet as they are ejected from stinging capsules under high pressure.…
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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 do Stinging Nettles Inject Poison?
The leaves of stinging nettles are covered in ‘pipette-like’ stingers which penetrate the skin on contact and deposit a small amount of poison.…
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Watch: How does Sea Ice affect Climate Change?
There is no doubt that sea ice in the polar regions is melting, but what is the exact role that this plays in the global climate system?…
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Watch – Fire and Ice: Burning Oil in the Polar Regions
One of the clean-up methods used following an oil spill is to burn the fuel on the surface of the ocean.…
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Watch: Visualising Airflow around a Sail with Experiments and Simulations
The flow of air around a sail is very different to that of a wing, but both generate significant lift force.…
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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: Simulating turbulence over canopies to improve air quality
By improving our understanding of turbulent flow over canopies we can design better cities to improve air quality. This is just one of the applications of the work of Alfredo Pinelli, a professor at City University of London working on Large Eddy Simulations (LES) of turbulence.…
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Watch: Building Squid and Octopus Robots for Underwater Exploration
Current underwater vehicles are rigid in structure which limits their suitability for many tasks required for ocean exploration. Francesco Giorgio-Serchi is working with a team at the University of Southampton to design new robots based on squids and octopuses that are made entirely from silicone.…
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Watch: Why shaking your head will NOT remove water from your ear
Removing water from your ear canal by shaking requires an acceleration 10 times that of gravity according to research from Sunny Jung at Virginia Tech (now Cornell).…
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Watch: Cleaning up Oil Spills using Maths
Following the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010, scientists at the University of Cambridge have been studying underwater plumes to try to understand how the Earth’s rotation affects the spread of oil.…
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Watch: How do bees carry pollen?
Pollen is the main source of protein in a honey bees diet and so it’s essential that they are able to carry enough of it safely back to the hive.…
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Watch: Building bio-inspired vehicles to explore Mars
The air density on Mars is 1/100th of that on Earth which means that current airborne vehicles cannot be used to explore the planet.…
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Watch: How do dandelions spread their seeds?
How are dandelion seeds able to travel distances of over 150km across oceans, with only small feathery bristles and the power of the wind?…
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Watch: How do citrus fruits create such a strong smell?
Citrus fruits contain small pockets of liquid which burst upon contact releasing a jet of strong smelling oil into the air.…
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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 Insects Walk on Water?
Using the surface tension of water and a hydrophobic coating on their legs, many insects are able to walk on water.…
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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: 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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Watch: Air pollution risk of cooking oil droplets
Cooking oil in a frying pan can be dangerous when the ‘explosive’ droplets touch your skin, but new research shows that they also increase the risk of indoor air pollution if not properly ventilated.…
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Dinosaurs, Propellers and Hiding Objects
A robot that swims like a dinosaur, simulations of industrial mixing, and how to hide an object by controlling its wake – take a sneak peek at the latest in fluid dynamics research.…
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Underwater Snakes, Gusty Flying, and Microswimmers
Learn how snakes catch prey underwater, what birds do when flying through gusts, and how sperm swim. This video is part of a collaboration between FYFD and the Journal of Fluid Mechanics featuring a series of interviews with researchers from the #APSDFD 2017 conference.…
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Flying beetles, stinging nettles and jellyfish
Tracking the invasive Rhinoceros Beetle in Hawai’i, studying how stinging nettles inject their toxin, and investigating the mechanism used by jellyfish to attack their prey – step inside the latest in Fluid Mechanics research.…
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Bioinspiration, underwater sniffing, and mixing toothpaste
Learn how termites are inspiring new building designs, how the star-nosed mole can sniff underwater, and what goes into making your toothpaste!…
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Getting water out of your ears, cycling in echelons, and sailing physics
Get your summer sports kick with a peek at some of the latest research on sailing aerodynamics, cycling groups, and getting that pesky water unstuck from your ear after swimming!…
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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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Martian Bees, Canopies, and Dandelion Seeds
Dandelion seeds that outperform man-made parachutes, designing the flow over forest canopies, and bee-inspired micro-robots for exploring Mars – catch up on the latest in fluid dynamics research.…
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Skiing, Avalanches and Freezing Bubbles
With cold weather and the Winter Olympics currently upon us, we bring you a special winter-themed video from JFM and FYFD.…
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GOOD ART IS (NOT) PRETTY ART
The October edition of Muses – the arts blog from BJPsych International – features a short blog by Motswana visual artist, Sedireng Mothibatsela, who writes about a crucial moment in her artistic development which coincides with her parent’s separation. It is a moving piece about how visual arts intersects with trauma and healing. I can recall the afternoon that changed how I create. I was 12 years old and in my last year of primary school and the looming high school years ahead presented many questions about how I wanted to proceed with my art. I had painted a watercolour still life and I was bored with it. Although my art received praise from my family and peers, my handling of watercolour was juvenile at best. I needed more; technically and conceptually. It was then that I began to question the art making process. Like most young artists in primary school we were simply taught that “good art is pretty art.”
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The Things We Don’t Know How to Say About Challenging Behaviour
I sat on a Zoom call with a psychologist from Edinburgh. My mental state, not my autistic son's, was in question.
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Akoma Ntoaso: On Adinkra Symbols or, Bidding Farewell: On Adinkra Symbols
The Akan people of Ghana, like many other collectivist cultures, have deeply engrained concepts of interdependence and support for each other. These concepts have been passed on for generations in the Adinkra symbols. Each symbol possesses an intrinsic meaning and represents virtues, values or beliefs critical to the Akan experience of life.
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MAKING BABY BLUES – INTERVIEW WITH FILM DIRECTOR, NORA AWOLOWO
The July edition of Muses – the arts blog from BJPsych International –features a short interview with Nora Awolowo, a Nigerian film director whose documentary film Baby Blues: Trials of Childbirth is a 74-minute-long exposé about maternal mental health in Nigeria.…
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Ayinla Omowura visits the dentist
The July 2023 edition of Muses – the arts blog from BJPsych International – features an article by Dr Olasunkanmi Onifade, Oral Medicine Consultant, Nigeria.
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Humility
The Royal College of Psychiatrists’ values and behaviours, Courage, Innovation, Respect, Collaboration, Learning and Excellence combine into the CIRCLE acronym. In the list under Excellence, a link takes you to core values for psychiatrists. One of those is humility.
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The impact of parasite infection of mental illness
More and more research is finding inflammation as a potential contributing factor towards to the development of various mental illnesses. A systematic review was conducted to determine the association between parasitic infection and mental illnesses in various African populations. Two parasite groups were evaluated; helminths and protozoans, and four mental illness classifications; depressive disorders, anxiety disorders, schizotypal disorders and unspecified mental illnesses.
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The impact of parasite infection of mental illness
More and more research is finding inflammation as a potential contributing factor towards to the development of various mental illnesses. A systematic review was conducted to determine the association between parasitic infection and mental illnesses in various African populations. Two parasite groups were evaluated; helminths and protozoans, and four mental illness classifications; depressive disorders, anxiety disorders, schizotypal disorders and unspecified mental illnesses.
Read more
Institutional Legacies and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families Spending Decisions: The Case of the Freedmen’s Bureau
In 1996, then-President Bill Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) into law, with the goal to “end welfare as we know it.”…
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Austerity and Young People’s Political Attitudes in the U.K.
In 2012, a Conservative-led coalition implemented austerity measures to restore the UK’s finances. The measures aimed to address the increase in public spending that had occurred during the Great Recession and included significant cuts to public services in the form of the 2012 Welfare Reform Act.…
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On time or with a delay? Transposition of EU directives in the Czech Republic in relation to subsidiarity check
National parliaments had been for long time losers of European integration with only very limited competences of information on new EU initiatives and of rubber-stamping transposition law compared to the national governments, which often negotiate EU law at the supranational level and propose its transposition acts at the national level.…
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Experimenting with tablet-making
At the end of the Greek Bronze Age, between c.1400-1200 BCE, the Mycenaean palaces of Crete and mainland Greece used small clay tablets to keep their accounting documents.
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Border clashes: the distributive politics of professional liberalisation in Greece
As Douwe Truijens and Marcel Hanegraaff have recently remarked (Truijens and Hanegraaff 2023), interest groups can play a very large role at the implementation stage of the policy cycle, potentially even reversing decisions made earlier in the cycle.…
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Academic publishing in 2023: what’s front of mind for archaeologists?
With 2023 on the horizon, and the landscape of academic publishing in flux, Cambridge University Press spoke to the Editors of the SAA’s journals to find out what topics and questions are currently front of mind – for archaeologists, researchers and publishers alike.…
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