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.
This video is part of a collaboration between FYFD and the Journal of Fluid Mechanics featuring a series of interviews with researchers from the APS DFD 2017 conference.
Sponsored by FYFD, the Journal of Fluid Mechanics, and the UK Fluids Network. Produced by Tom Crawford and Nicole Sharp with assistance from A.J. Fillo.
Video of my ‘Teddy Talk’ at the 2019 St Edmund Hall open day.
Rivers are the major source of pollution in the oceans and if we are to clean them up, we first need to know where the majority of the pollution is concentrated. By creating a mathematical model for river outflows – verified by laboratory experiments and fieldwork – the goal is to be able to predict which areas are most susceptible to pollution from rivers and thus coordinate clean-up operations as effectively as possible.
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.
This video is part of a collaboration between FYFD and the Journal of Fluid Mechanics featuring a series of interviews with researchers from the APS DFD 2017 conference.
Sponsored by FYFD, the Journal of Fluid Mechanics, and the UK Fluids Network. Produced by Tom Crawford and Nicole Sharp with assistance from A.J. Fillo.
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. In this video, Nathalie Vriend and Jonny Tsang from the University of Cambridge explain how the granular fingering instability causes granular convection and particle segregation, with examples of experiments and numerical simulations from their research.
This video is part of a collaboration between FYFD and the Journal of Fluid Mechanics featuring a series of interviews with researchers from the APS DFD 2017 conference. Sponsored by FYFD, the Journal of Fluid Mechanics, and the UK Fluids Network. Produced by Tom Crawford and Nicole Sharp with assistance from A.J. Fillo.
A short review of intern Joe Double’s work with Tom Rocks Maths over the summer of 2018. Written for the OUS East Kent branch who provided funding for the project.
‘First of all, I must thank you again for the grant, and for the warmth and friendliness at your event; it was an absolute delight to give my presentation and talk to your members, as it has been interacting with you in general.
I had the opportunity to work with one of my tutors over the summer to produce pieces for a general audience about complex mathematical topics. Without the help of the OUS East Kent group, I couldn’t have taken up this opportunity – with their grant’s help, I was able to afford to live in Oxford through a large part of the summer, allowing me to work in close contact with my tutor and use his studio for creating the videos and audio pieces I worked on. The OUSEK grant can be put to use far more flexibly than those from bigger schemes (which always have preconditions to meet about how the project will apply to industry, say), so I couldn’t recommend applying more if you have an idea for a project for your time at Oxford which is on the unusual side!’
My video ‘how plesiosaurs ruled the ocean with their flippers’ has been shortlisted for a prize in the On Zientzia science video competition. You can vote for my entry by clicking here and rating the video out of 5 stars.
“The aim of the competition is to promote the production and dissemination of short, original videos that foment positive and progress values of science and technology, and that can be used by any kind of public for consultation purposes. The subject is totally free and can deal with one’s own or other people’s research, red-hot issues in society or the scientific community, personal scientific and technical passions, basic science concepts, scientific milestones, historical figures and science of the future or the past.”
The final episode of Tom Rocks Maths on Oxide Radio for 2018 goes out with a bang. We’ve got another million-dollar maths problem, a healthy dose of nakedness, and we try chopping up traffic cones with a saw. Plus, music from Jay-Z/Linkin Park, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and the Foo Fighters. This is maths, but not as you know it…
Author and broadcaster Alex Bellos interviews 2018 Abel Prize Laureate Robert Langlands after he receives the award from King Harald V of Norway. Langlands discusses his early childhood in Canada, his choice of maths at university because it was ‘easy’, his meeting with Norwegian mathematician Atle Selberg at Princeton, and finally his advice for young mathematicians looking to make their mark on the subject.
Produced by Tom Crawford with support from the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. The third in a series of videos documenting my experience at the 2018 Abel Prize week in Oslo.
Bees are not only able to build fantastic hexagonal honeycombs they’re apparently also able to count! But do they deserve their reputation as nature’s mathematicians? Georgia Mills spoke to Srini Srinivasan from the University of Queensland to find out how they discovered counting bees…
Bees were trained to fly down a tunnel with a reward of sugar water at the end, and a series of identical landmarks labelled 1, 2, 3, 4, etc. along the route.
One of the landmarks contained the reward and the bees had to test each one to discover its location. This was repeated several times until the bees learned the location of the reward.
The spacing of the landmarks was then changed, but the reward remained at the same landmark, and the bees had to find it once again.
They were able to ‘count’ the number of landmarks and would go straight to the correct location bypassing the others that did not contain a reward.
The highest number of sequential landmarks the bees were able to ‘count’ was 4.
Four is a universal number as when briefly presented with an image containing a number of objects, the largest amount most animals can recognise accurately is 4-5. This process is called subitising.
Counting to 4 is useful for bees when for example deciding whether or not to land on a flower to collect pollen. If there are 3-4 bees already there then it is probably not worth their effort.
Counting has also been looked at in fish birds and chimpanzees, and in each case the number four keeps cropping up, suggesting universality.
The tunnel experiment was actually designed to investigate how bees navigate and the corresponding ‘waggle dance’ that they use to communicate information.
You can listen to the full interview with the Naked Scientists here.
