{"id":218515,"date":"2025-07-22T23:12:57","date_gmt":"2025-07-23T04:12:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/07\/how-do-water-rings-bounce-new-discovery-answers-decades-old-question"},"modified":"2025-07-22T23:12:57","modified_gmt":"2025-07-23T04:12:57","slug":"how-do-water-rings-bounce-new-discovery-answers-decades-old-question","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/07\/how-do-water-rings-bounce-new-discovery-answers-decades-old-question","title":{"rendered":"How do water rings \u2018bounce?\u2019 New discovery answers decades-old question"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/how-do-water-rings-bounce-new-discovery-answers-decades-old-question2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Air rings blown by dolphins swimming underwater and rings of smoke emitted by jet engines are just two examples of vortex rings. These doughnut-shaped structures and their mesmerizing movement have been studied for decades given their role in propulsion and\u2014in the case of jellyfish and other invertebrates\u2014biological locomotion.<\/p>\n<p>A team of researchers at New York University and NYU Shanghai has uncovered a remarkable property of vortex rings that has been overlooked for more than a century\u2014one that illuminates how these rings respond when they move through water and reach air (i.e., at the water-air interface).<\/p>\n<p>When a vortex <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/ring\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">ring<\/a> traveling sideways and up through water reaches the surface and meets air, it can rebound while largely maintaining its shape\u2014much like a <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/tennis+ball\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">tennis ball<\/a> bouncing off a wall. After the reflection, the ring loses only a small fraction of its energy. However, if the vortex ring moves more directly upward, it breaks apart instead of bouncing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Air rings blown by dolphins swimming underwater and rings of smoke emitted by jet engines are just two examples of vortex rings. These doughnut-shaped structures and their mesmerizing movement have been studied for decades given their role in propulsion and\u2014in the case of jellyfish and other invertebrates\u2014biological locomotion. A team of researchers at New York [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,1491],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-218515","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biological","category-transportation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218515","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=218515"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218515\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=218515"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=218515"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=218515"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}