Lmst

PC prediction, slightly going out on a limb: with 12VHPWR / 12V2x6 connectors still melting, PC power supplies and high-end GPUs will switch to using a higher voltage to feed the extremely power-hungry beasts. Probably 24V, but they could go higher.

With the cards already doing DC-DC conversion down to much lower voltages for the GPU and memory, there's no need to stick with 12V, and doubling the voltage will allow them to cut the current needed in half -- and since it's the high current levels that is causing all the thermal issues, it's an obvious fix.

#PC #GPU #power #melt #ATX12V2X6 #12VHPWR #12V2X6 #voltage #current #melting

The Best of FYFD 2025

Happy 2026! This will be a big year for me. I’ll be finishing up and turning in the manuscript for my first book — which flows between cutting edge research, scientists’ stories, and the societal impacts of fluid physics. It’s a culmination of 15 years of FYFD, rendered into narrative. I’m so excited to share it with you when it’s published in 2027.

As always, though, we’ll kick off the year with a look back at some of FYFD’s most popular posts of 2025. (You can find previous editions, too, for 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, and 2014.) Without further ado, here they are:

Charged Drops Don’t Splash
Strata of Starlings
Espresso in Slow-Mo
The Incredible Engineering of the Alhambra
Uranus Emits More Than Thought1
Kolmogorov Turbulence
Bow Shock Instability
How Particles Affect Melting Ice
The Puquios System of Nazca
Cooling Tower Demolition
A Glimpse of the Solar Wind
Bubbling Up
A Sprite From Orbit
Cornflower Roots Growing
How Sunflowers Follow the Sun

What a great bunch of topics! I’m especially happy to see so many research and research-adjacent posts were popular. And a couple of history-related posts; I don’t write those too often, but I love them for showing just how wide-ranging fluid physics can be.

Interested in keeping up with FYFD in 2026? There are lots of ways to follow along so that you don’t miss a post.

And if you enjoy FYFD, please remember that it’s a reader-supported website. I don’t run ads, and it’s been years since my last sponsored post. You can help support the site by becoming a patron, buying some merch, or simply by sharing on social media. And if you find yourself struggling to remember to check the website, remember you can get FYFD in your inbox every two weeks with our newsletter. Happy New Year!

(Image credits: droplet – F. Yu et al., starlings – K. Cooper, espresso – YouTube/skunkay, fountain – Primal Space, Uranus – NASA, turbulence – C. Amores and M. Graham, capsule – A. Álvarez and A. Lozano-Duran, melting ice – S. Bootsma et al., puquios – Wikimedia, cooling towers – BBC, solar wind – NASA/APL/NRL, Lake Baikal – K. Makeeva, sprite – NASA, roots – W. van Egmond, sunflowers – Deep Look)

I know what I did. ↩︎

#biology #bowShock #espresso #flowVisualization #fluidDynamics #fluidsAsArt #history #ice #melting #physics #plants #science #shockwave #solarWind #splashes #sprite #turbulence #Uranus

#Homesteading adventure of the day: The spring water hose froze, no running water, wife grumpy, #Knirps screaming (he picks up moods). I hauled a bucket up the well, but that made nobody happy.

It didn't freeze in lower temperatures last winter, I guess it was the lack of snow cover combined with high wind chill.

Initial thoughts of making a fire on the steel cover were quickly discarded when I remembered I had a forced air diesel heater sitting in the garbarn.

Pounded a steel post into the frozen ground to secure a rope, slithered partway down a steep, snowy slope and set up the spring heater 😁

Couple hours later, water from the tap resumes and I'm warming my frozen buttcheeks on the tile heater. ☕

#Homestead #Spring #Water #Frozen #DIY #Melting #DieselHeater #Adventure

A wheel barrow loaded with: A bright orange forced air diesel heater combined with a full tank of reclaimed diesel fuel, a car battery, a rusty steel pipe/fence post, a huge mallet named Mjölnir, a screwdriver and a ratty old piece of rope.

The setup in place and running: The orange box is blowing hot air under the lifted lid of the captured spring in the forest. An old piece of plastic foil is forming a skirt around the opening, professionally secured with some sticks from the forest. The car batter supplies both power and the rear foot of the heater so the hot steel exhaust pipe can exit underneath without touching anything flammable. A locking bar and some covers are thrown aside. The ground is covered with a thin layer of snow.

Thermal imaging capture. The spring lid is -6°C with warm air starting to heat it up. The exhasut pipe already 106°C. The bottom of the heater is also warm.

An hour later, the spring lid has warmed up to +12°C in places and even the coldest part is only -2 now. It took another hour after that to melt.

#silentsunday #melting #frost #sunlight #mist #grass #nevel #rijp #spiderwebthreads #spinnenrag #spinnenweb #spiderweb #natuur #nature #winter #december

Frost on a grass flower melting in sunlight

Melting Man

Controlled melting a 3D print using a heat gun.

https://www.ideepix.nl/projects/blog/melting-man/

Peak Glacier Extinction In The Mid-Twenty-First Century
--
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-025-02513-9 <-- shared paper
--
“📉 KEY FINDINGS
• At +4 °C, only ~18,000 glaciers remain worldwide by 2100
• At +1.5 °C, ~100,000 glaciers survive
• [They] identif[ed] “Peak Glacier Extinction”:
– ~2041 at +1.5 °C (~2,000 glaciers lost per year)
– ~2055 at +4 °C (~4,000 glaciers lost per year)
🏔️ THE ALPS
• At +2.7 °C, only ~110 glaciers remain by 2100.
• At +4 °C, this drops to just ~20.
Can you imagine the Alps with almost no glaciers left?...”
#model #modeling #global #glacier #loss #glacial #cryosphere #spatialanalysis #spatiotemporal #GloGEM #OGGM #PyGEM #extinction #climate #climatechange #globalwarming #water #hydrology #freshwater #surfacewater #count #metrics #volume #thickness #size #sealevelrise #tourism #culture #usecase #waterresources #Alps #TheAlps #worldwide #melted #melting

“Melting Snowflake”

It’s hard to preserve something as ephemeral as a snowflake, as seen in this microphotograph by Michael Robert Peres. Despite the old adage, it is possible to make identical snowflakes, but it requires mirroring the freezing conditions exactly, including both temperature and humidity. Here, the snowflake’s crystalline structure survives as a ghost in a melting droplet. (Image credit: M. Peres; via Ars Technica)

#fluidDynamics #fluidsAsArt #freezing #melting #physics #science #snowflakes

"Melting snowflake" by Michael Robert Peres.

from 2015, an elegant dragon creature has an unusual problem. I generally do not depict pleasant things happening to creatures that wear bowties, and conventialy that is not what elegant vulpine commissioned me to do

#robision #melting #fancy #bowtie #tuxedo #melt #animation #animated #agony #glop

#melting #iceshelves #underseastorms #Antarctic

Original article (paywalled, log in to your local university library to read)

Poinelli et al. Nat. Geosci. (2025)

Ocean submesoscales as drivers of submarine melting within Antarctic ice cavities.

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-025-01831-z

slime and punishment
apparently I made this in 2015 for a person varyingly called elegant vulipne and meltingtuxedo

#mastoart #melt #melting #animation #animated #animatedgif #proud #smug #anthrofox #foxanthro #anthropomorphic #furry #furryart #anthropomorphicart

One century of glaciers melting https://www.tiktok.com/@sostenibilidadconkuki/video/7574511317894188295 #glacier #melting

Continuous Monitoring Of A Glacier’s Extinction
--
https://doi.org/10.1017/aog.2025.10024 <-- shared technical letter
--
#GIS #spatial #ampping #spatialanalysis #spatiotemporal #glaciermassbalance # glaciermonitoring #supraglacial debris #glacier #extinction #glacial #monitoring #melting #climate #water #hydrology #cryosphere #Pizolgletscher #PizolGletscher #SwissAlps #Switzerland #massbalance #insitu #GLAMOS

Could #Melting #Ice Awaken #Antarctica’s #Volcanoes — and #Trigger a #Feedback Loop? : Medium

First new type of #Malaria #Treatment in decades shows #Promise against #Drug #Resistance : Nature

#Pictures of the year #2025 : Nat Geo

Latest #KnowledgeLinks

https://knowledgezone.co.in/resources/bookmarks

Rethinking Policy On High Mountain Cascading Hazards
--
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-025-01834-w <-- shared technical correspondence
--
https://ethz.ch/en/news-and-events/eth-news/news/2025/05/what-eth-glacier-researchers-know-about-the-collapse-of-the-birchgletscher-glacier.html <-- shared technical article, “What ETH glacier researchers know about the collapse of the Birch Glacier”
--
#cryosphericscience #geomorphology #geomorphometry #engineeringeology #hydrology #naturalhazards #planning #mitigation #risk #hazard #policy #massmovement #risk #hazard #change #infrastructure #flood #flooding #damage #cost #geology #massmovement #naturalhazards #disaster #snow #ice #glacier #melting #climate #warmer #BirchGlacier #Switzerland #avalanche #Blatten #Nepal #SetiKohla #publicsafety #warning #GLOF #Chamoli #India #Sedongpu #Tibet #cascading #water #hydrology #slope #landslide #global

Bang! …and Melt

Finally setting up to shoot some stereoscopic 3D print melting, I heard a loud bang

https://www.ideepix.nl/projects/blog/bang-and-melt/

Squirrel Candle
#photography, #365photodgraphy2025, #potd2025, #photoaday, #everydayphotographer, #photooftheday, #pad2025-313, #decorative, #candle, #flame, #melting, #macro

A decorative candle in the shape of squirrel is lit with a warm glow coming from the top of the candle

Squirrel Candle
#photography, #365photodgraphy2025, #potd2025, #photoaday, #everydayphotographer, #photooftheday, #pad2025-313, #decorative, #candle, #flame, #melting, #macro

Salt and Sea Ice Aging

Sea ice’s high reflectivity allows it to bounce solar rays away rather than absorb them, but melting ice exposes open waters, which are better at absorbing heat and thus lead to even more melting. To understand how changing sea ice affects climate, researchers need to tease out the mechanisms that affect sea ice over its lifetime. A new study does just that, showing that sea ice loses salt as it ages, in a process that makes it less porous.

Researchers built a tank that mimicked sea ice by holding one wall at a temperature below freezing and the opposite wall at a constant, above-freezing temperature. Over the first three days, ice formed rapidly on the cold wall. But it did not simply sit there, once formed. Instead, the researchers noticed the ice changing shape while maintaining the same average thickness. The ice got more transparent over time, too, indicating that it was losing its pores.

Looking closer, the team realized that the aging ice was slowly losing its salt. As the water froze, it pushed salt into liquid-filled pores in the ice. One wall of the pore was always colder than the others, causing ice to continue freezing there, while the opposite wall melted. Over time, this meant that every pore slowly migrated toward the warm side of the ice. Once the pore reached the surface, the briny liquid inside was released into the water and the ice left behind had one fewer pores. Repeated over and over, the ice eventually lost all its pores. (Image credit: T. Haaja; research credit and illustration: Y. Du et al.; via APS)

#climateChange #fluidDynamics #freezing #geophysics #melting #physics #science #seaIce