In fluid dynamics, the hard science is often of dazzling beauty—a fact that the American Physical Society highlights every year through a photo/video contest. Here are this year's winners - all of them captivating, hypnotic and visually stunning. It may be a strangely narrow contest of images, but once you start looking at these works, you realize they really are "up there."

These video entries feature beautiful footage of fluid dynamics experiments, complete with classical music, annotations, and slideshows so that you can enjoy the visuals while gaining insight into the phenomena being studied.

They are highly addictive and often very relaxing and informative.

In Frost Spread Dynamics, we see how hemispherical condensation bubbles transform into sharp frost peaks when the surface to which they are attached is supercooled, and observe how tiny frost bridges spread frost in a circular pattern.

In LiquidLace, we're treated to a visual feast as we watch thermal shots of a 3D printer overextruded hot polymer into a series of coils that cool as they hit the ground. We then saw how the polymer under extrusion carefully creates useful lightweight "lace" patterns with programmable levels of stretch.

Visualization and feature tracking of impact jet atomization provide a glimpse into rocket propulsion, focusing on the slow-motion atomization technique where two nozzles fire jets of fuel at each other. When they meet, the jets are flung into flakes and the flakes are torn into droplets, ready for optimal combustion.

Now we turn to aquatic robots. Swim faster or farther? Answers from robo-eel1-guilla A team of researchers built an 85-centimetre-long (33-inch) robo-eel with a flexible tail powered by eight motors. They then had it swim in a variety of different ways, studying factors that affect speed and energy efficiency so you'll want to rethink your moves the next time you're in the pool.

Like the videos, the photos in this contest come with annotations, effectively turning them into college versions of the science posters you made in school. Again, here are some winning entries - but since they're posters, we'll let them explain themselves!

Documenting how floating ice cubes tumble, flip and pause as they melt NYU

Studying how vibrations tear apart droplets in zero gravity Imperial College London/University of Cambridge

Put the resonator in water and you can see the waves in the cavity it createsBrown/NUWC/BYU

You can find more videos and images on the Fluid Motion Gallery competition website.