Christopher Batty's job is to make super satisfying animations like these—all day, every day. But you won't see "artist" or even "graphic designer" printed on his business card. Batty is a professor of computer science at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, and the animations he makes aren't to appease the ASMR contingents on YouTube.

Mostly his animations form the basis of special effects in films, but they have wider scientific appeal: Batty's techniques are also used to to view or measure phenomena that either don't exist on Earth or are too dangerous in real life. Think, how a bridge might react to strong winds, or how building a dam could alter river flows.

Batty tells me how a particular method for simulating bubbles he wrote with colleagues from Columbia is now being used to model how an embryo develops in the womb, based on the gravitational or chemical forces it experiences.