my thesis involves this principle! in fluids, viscosity (the thickness/stickiness of the fluid) and inertia (the tendency of something to stay in motion when a force is exerted) are in competition. glycerin is incredibly viscous, so the viscosity beats the inertia and the dye doesn’t shift beyond where it is immediately pushed–so exerting an equal and opposite force on the dye just puts it back to its exactly original position.
thanks @thatswhyhesprime for the red-green-gray color palette! its been seven hundred fifty three years and two days since i bothered doing anything in this style (because i somehow… forgot that i had an airbrush tool LMFAO) but i started doing this one and just. it turned. Like This. thanks for the prompt i had no idea what to do at first but this was fun as FUCK
Nearly every lab has a magnetic stirrer for mixing fluids, but this ubiquitous tool still holds some surprises, like its ability to unexpectedly levitate. Magnetic stirrers consist of two main parts, a driving magnet that creates a rotating magnetic field, and a bar magnet – commonly referred to as the flea – that is submerged in the fluid to be stirred. When the driver’s rotating field is active, the flea will spin at the bottom of its container, keeping its magnetic field in sync with the driver.
But if you place the flea in a viscous enough fluid, the drag forces on the flea can pull it out of sync with the driver’s field. Above a certain speed, the flea will jump so that its field repulses the driver’s. That makes the flea levitate as it spins. Depending on the interplay of viscous and magnetic forces, that spin can be unstable (left) or stable (right). The researchers suggest that this peculiar behavior could help artificial swimmers propel themselves or lead to new methods for measuring fluid viscosity. (Image and research credit: K. Baldwin et al.; via APS; submitted by Kam-Yung Soh)
You’ve seen it a million times. When you turn on your kitchen faucet, the falling water forms a distinctive ring – known as a hydraulic jump – in the bottom of your sink. First described by Leonardo da Vinci, this phenomenon has been studied for centuries, and, for nearly all of that time, scientists assumed that gravity played a major role, even in kitchen-sink-sized hydraulic jumps. But that’s not the case.
A newly published study shows that gravity can’t be a major player in setting the radius of these small-scale hydraulic jumps because they form the same whether the jet impinges from above, below, or sideways. Instead, the researchers found that surface tension and viscosity are the parameters that determine the jump’s formation. It’s not every day that you get to overturn a centuries-old theory in physics! (Image credit: J. Kilfiger; research credit: R. Bhagat et al.; via Silicon Republic; submitted by Patrick D.)
I recently found my “gold” hammer after misplacing it. It’s my favorite tool ever because it looks like a regular hammer trying to be fancy,
but then you twist both halves and unscrew it to find a flat-head screwdriver in the middle.
BUT, if you twist the very end and unscrew that
you find a phillips screwdriver.
BUT DON’T THINK THAT’S ALL THERE IS!THERE’S MORE!! unscrew the very end again to find a smaller flat-head screwdriver!
BUT THAT’S STILL NOT THE END!!
unscrew the end of this screwdriver to find a final, teeny tiny, flat-head screwdriver
look at how cute it is!
it’s like a matryoshka doll of tools.
I have one of these and I keep it in my IT toolkit because that teeny little screwdriver is the right side for laptop casings, but because it lives inside a large object it’s harder to misplace than a standard tiny screwdriver. Also because the look on a client’s face when you bring out a brass hammer to fix their laptop is absolutely wild.
I have this EXACT SAME HAMMER! My grandpa gave it to me when I was a kid. That was 30+ years ago! Do they still make them?
They definitely still make them, but they’re harder to find. I’ve had a couple over the years. I adored them.
I have the same thing, only it’s covered in splotchy multicolored paint! I’ve assembled so much furniture with that thing.
DarkestElemental616 