15.07.03

Loading player...

What do fish and aircraft have in common? Well, water and air are both fluids. And when fish move their tails and bodies from side to side, they push against the surrounding water and leave behind a mini whirlpool or vortex, which contains information about the drag forces experienced by the fish as it moved along. And if you can wind back the events that produced the vortex you can work out how it formed in the first place and therefore how much drag the fish felt. This is what Florian Huhn, from the German Aerospace Centre, has managed to do. And because aeroplanes produce very similar vortices in the air, the same technique can be used to develop improved aircraft designs, as he explains to Tom Crawford...

2 Jul 2015 English United Kingdom Science

Other recent episodes

Keeping humans healthy in orbit

With only a few walls between an astronaut and a rapid death, what do we know about the various dangers to the human body during space travel? Chris Smith spoke with Mark Shelhamer, a professor of Otolaryngology - Head and Neck Surgery at John Hopkins Medical School - about which…

10 Sep 6 min

Ants doing gene therapy, and tadpole microbiomes

This month, as the eLife Podcast hits its century, we hear how getting frog dads to cross-foster tadpoles has revealed the way in which some frogs come by their microbiomes, the ants that do gene therapy, signs that disease causes a breakdown in nutrient exchange between the elements of the…

7 Sep 43 min

Synthetic sustainable spuds

As the global population heads toward 10 billion, the pressure on agriculture is mounting. With that in mind, the UK's Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA) has announced millions of pounds worth of funding for crops enhanced through synthetic biology by designing entirely new chromosomes and chloroplasts, starting with the…

9 Jul 5 min

Scientists say they've bent spacetime

"Warp speed, Mr Sulu." It's the kind of command we've only heard in science fiction - until now. Did a team of scientists just bend spacetime using nothing but sparks in a lab? That's right - not black holes, not neutron stars - electrical sparks. A new experiment claims to…

23 Jun 5 min

Finland's giant virus, and monkeys take care of their teeth

In the eLife podcast, a university compost heap has turned up Finland's first documented "giant virus". Also, why monkeys de-sand their supper, and how learning more languages actually makes brain tissue thinner. Then, the link between sugar and neonatal sepsis, and how a cancer controls its hydra host by bestowing…

19 Jun 38 min

All episodes