A popular party trick is to fill a glass bottle with water and hit the top of the bottle with an open hand, causing the bottom of the bottle to break open. We investigate the source of the catastrophic cracking through the use of high-speed video and an accelerometer. Upon closer inspection, it is obvious that the acceleration caused by hitting the top of the bottle is followed by the formation of bubbles near the bottom. The nearly instantaneous acceleration creates an area of low pressure on the bottom of the bottle where cavitation bubbles form. Moments later, the cavitation bubbles collapse at roughly 10 times the speed of formation, causing the bottle to break. The accelerometer data shows that the bottle is broken after the bubbles collapse and that the magnitude of the bubble collapse is greater than the initial impact. This fluid dynamics video highlights that this trick will not work if the bottle is empty nor if it is filled with a carbonated fluid because the vapor bubbles fill with the CO 2 dissolved in the liquid, preventing the bubbles from collapsing. A modified cavitation number, including the acceleration of the fluid (a), vapor pressure (P v ), and depth of the fluid column (h), is derived to determine when cavity inception occurs. Through experimentation, visible cavitation bubbles form when the cavitation number is less than 0.5. The experiments, based on the modified cavitation number, reveal that the easiest way to break a glass bottle with your bare hands is to fill it with a non-carbonated, high vapor pressure fluid, and strike it hard. [1]

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During speech, air from the lungs is forced past the vocal folds which vibrate, producing sound. A pulsatile jet of air is formed downstream of the vibrating folds which interacts with the various structures in the airway. Currently, it is postulated that the way this jet interacts with the downstream structures in the airway directly affects the quality of human speech. In order to better understand this jet, it is desirable to visualize the jet in three dimensions. We present the results of a method that reconstructs the three dimensional velocity field using Synthetic aperture PIV (SAPIV) [1].SAPIV uses an array of high-speed cameras to artificially create a single camera with a variable focal length. This is accomplished by overlapping the images from the array to create a "focal stack." As the images are increasingly overlapped, more distant image planes come into focus. 3D PIV is then performed on the "refocused" focal stack to reconstruct the flow field in three dimensions. SAPIV has the ability to track very high particle densities.Artificial self oscillating vocal folds made of silicone were driven with compressed air infused with small glass microspheres. As the vocal folds vibrated, the entrained microspheres were illuminated by a laser volume. Eight high-speed cameras were used to capture images of the particles for SAPIV postprocessing.SAPIV was able to successfully perform the first whole-field reconstruction of the pulsatile jet emerging from the vocal folds. The ability to visualize this jet will help researchers and clinicians better 1