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Tears stream down your face. A beer flows down the side of a pint glass. Fluid mechanics is central to understanding the world around us. The beauty of fluid motion was on display last week in Seattle, where more than 3,000 scientists gathered for the 72nd Annual Meeting of the American Physical Society’s Division of Fluid Dynamics. Created in 1987, the Gallery of Fluid Motion (GFM) is the premier visual record of contemporary fluid mechanics.

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Fire ants build living rafts to survive floods and rainy seasons. Georgia Tech scientists are studying if a fire ant colony’s ability to respond to changes in their environment during a flood is an instinctual behavior and how fluid forces make them respond.

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Oil spills in the ocean can cause devastation to wildlife, so effective cleanup is a top priority. Research shows the effects of chemical herders, which are agents that may be used to concentrate oil spills, on wave breaking.

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Fog harvesting is a potential practical source of fresh water in foggy coastal deserts, and current solutions rely on meter scale nets/meshes. The mesh geometry, however, presents a physiologically inappropriate shape for millimeter scale bulk bodies, like insects.

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Computational fluid dynamics can be used to study how extinct animals used to swim. Scientists studied 65 million-year-old cephalopod fossils to gain deeper understanding of modern-day cephalopod ecosystems.

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How can you tell when a storm is going to produce a tornado even before the twister forms? Research from Oklahoma State University and University of Nebraska-Lincoln indicates prior to tornado formation, storms emit low-frequency sounds.

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The shrinking of the clouds of the Great Red Spot on Jupiter has been well documented with photographic evidence from the last decade. However, researchers said there is no evidence the vortex itself has changed in size or intensity.

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A collaboration at University of Michigan is taking a unique approach to fluid mechanics by teaching it through dance, creating Kármán Vortex Street, a dance improvisation guided by physics properties.

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While changing the rotation rate/axis of a thrown baseball has long been a weapon in a pitcher’s arsenal, some pitchers manipulate the baseball’s wake to create unexpected movement from a familiar delivery of his changeup.

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Age-related macular degeneration is the primary cause of central vision loss and results in the center of the visual field being blurred or fully blacked out. Though treatable, some methods can be ineffective or cause unwanted side effects. Jinglin Huang, a graduate student in medical engineering at Caltech, suggests inefficient fluid mixing of the injected medicine and the gel within the eye may be to blame.

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Trapped water in the ear canal can cause infection and even damage, but it turns out that one of the most common methods people use to get rid of water in their ears can also cause complications. Researchers show shaking the head to free trapped water can cause brain damage in small children.

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When it comes to archery, choosing the right feathers for an arrow is the key to winning. This necessity for precision makes it crucial to understand how environment and design effect arrows in flight.

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Press conferences for the 72nd Annual Meeting of the American Physical Society Division of Fluid Dynamics in Seattle will be held Monday, Nov. 25, at the Washington State Convention Center. The conferences, which will be webcast, will focus on research into how flow control is making some MLB pitchers nearly unhittable, predicting tornado formation from the sounds that storms make and teaching fluid mechanics through dance, as well as other discoveries in fluid dynamics.

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The American Physical Society’s Division of Fluid Dynamics 72nd Annual Meeting will take place on Nov. 23-26, 2019, in Seattle, Washington. Journalists are invited to attend the meeting for free. Live press webcasts, featuring a selection of newsworthy research, will take place during the meeting. Fluid dynamics is an interdisciplinary field that investigates visible and invisible phenomena from a wide range of disciplines including engineering, physics, biology, oceanography, atmospheric science and geology.

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Researchers are exploring how irregular filling mechanics may contribute to defects in developing fetal hearts because inefficient filling leads to energy losses that alter the heart’s structure and performance, and studying how filling mechanics and flow structure change over the course of gestation. During the American Physical Society’s Division of Fluid Dynamics 71st Annual Meeting, Nov. 18-20, they will discuss the team’s findings on human fetal cardiac flow measurements collected from normal and abnormal fetal echocardiogram exams.

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In aquaponics, the hydroponic crops use the nutrients from fish waste as fertilizer while the fish benefit from the plants’ nutrient uptake capability to improve water quality. The treated water is then recirculated to the plant grow beds and fish culture tanks via a pipe system. Researchers at the University of New Hampshire, who are studying ways to improve water flow for more efficient aquaponic systems, will present their work at the APS Division of Fluid Dynamics 71st Annual Meeting, Nov. 18-20.

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As professional divers complete what’s known as a rip dive, their hands remove water in front of the body, creating a cavity that reduces the initial impact force. The rest of the body is aligned to shoot through the same cavity created by the hands. Using the hands to create cavities in the water's surface is similar to the concept behind the fluid-structure studies that researchers at Utah State University are conducting using spheres. They’ll present their work at the APS Division of Fluid Dynamics 71st Annual Meeting, Nov. 18-20.

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Ever watch aquatic animals jump out of the water and wonder how they manage to do it in such a streamlined and graceful way? Researchers who specialize in water entry and exit in nature had the same question. During the APS Division of Fluid Dynamics 71st Annual Meeting, Nov. 18-20, they will present their work designing a robotic system inspired by jumping copepods and frogs to illuminate some of the fluid dynamics at play when aquatic animals jump.

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Wok tossing is essential for making a good fried rice -- or so claim a group of researchers presenting new work at the APS Division of Fluid Dynamics 71st Annual Meeting, Nov. 18-20. The researchers became interested in the physics of cooking and, seeking to satiate their curiosity, they focused on stir-fry, which lies at the heart of Chinese cuisine. The team set out to isolate the key elements of this venerable cooking technique.

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Some animals explore, interpret and understand the world with such sensitivity in their noses that people have enlisted canines to help solve crime and detect cancer on the breath. Scientists at Georgia Tech are now homing in on the secrets behind animals’ super sniffers to develop an artificial chemical sensor that could be used for a variety of tasks, from food safety to national security. Thomas Spencer will present the group’s latest design for an electronic nose that concentrates odors for improved chemical sensing at the APS Division of Fluid Dynamics 71st Annual Meeting, Nov. 18-20.