The Curated Internet

In this set of images the smoke from an incense stick is seen making a transition from a smooth laminar flow (very close to the incense stick) to a turbulent flow (far away from the incense stick) while passing through the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability (rolling vortices).

In this image a film of oil placed in between plastic sheets is captured by passing the background light through two polarizing filters.

Water when heated in a pan from below reveals a far more intricate world that what meets the eye.  The box indicates the field of view of the camera used to capture the phenomenon with respect to the pan filled with water.         

 

One of the easiest way to visualize fluid phenomenon is by placing your fluid on top of a bright striped background. And by measuring the deviations of this striped pattern, it is possible to infer a lot of sensible data such as the changes in density of the fluid and so on.  In this post, this technique is demonstrated in water using an alternating red-black striped pattern as the background. If the region of interest is only the surface on the other hand, the bright striped pattern can be made to reflect off the top of the fluid surface. We demonstrated this technique in our ‘Water is diamagnetic: A simple experiment’ post which you can check out here [broken link].