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The 11 Year Soap Bubble

-Overdrive- writes "Popular Science has an interesting article about an inventor and his 11 year quest for Colored Bubbles" From the article: " It turns out that coloring a bubble is an exceptionally difficult bit of chemistry. A bubble wall is mostly water held in place by two layers of surfactant molecules, spaced just millionths of an inch apart. If you add, say, food coloring to the bubble solution, the heavy dye molecules float freely in the water, bonding to neither the water nor the surfactants, and cascade almost immediately down the sides. You'll have a clear bubble with a dot of color at the bottom. What you need is a dye that attaches to the surfactant molecules and disperses evenly in that water layer. Pack in more dye molecules, get a deeper, richer hue. Simple. Well, on paper anyway."

4 of 259 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Yet another dup... by Imsdal · · Score: 4, Interesting
    In all honesty, it should be noted that this was a duplicate on Digg as well...

    Also, I noted that the article referred to soap bubbles as "the world's most popular toy". Here is an interesting question for all of us: what is actually the world's most popular toy, and how do one measure it? I'm willing to bet a good amount soap bubbles isn't the correct answer...

  2. no dup by mennucc1 · · Score: 5, Interesting
    hi Cowboy Neal, here is my advice to you.
    You should add a small snippet of code and insert it into the publication process; this snippet of code extracts all URLs from the href's in the proposed posting, and searches all posting of last 18months to see if they appear somewhere: in that case, a HUGE RED warning will flash on the screen, asking the post writer (and/or the editor) to check that the proposed posting is not a duplicate.
    For example, Nov 11, the posting Mad Scientist Invents Colored Bubbles appears in ./ and contains the URL
    http://www.popsci.com/popsci/science/0a03b5108e0 97010vgnvcm1000004eecbccdrcrd.html
    Then in Nov 23, when ScuttleMonkey proposes The 11 Year Soap Bubble, the script notices that that same URL has already appeared in Mad Scientist Invents Colored Bubbles and warns , and we avoid seeing this dup post.
  3. Re:DUPE! by will_die · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Your to late for the ketchup idea.
    Since 1952 the US Government has been testing ketchup. Ketchup must flow between 3-7 centimeters in 30 seconds to be considered Grade A. Ketchup that flow closer to the 3-centimeter mark receive better scores. Ketchups that are too thick or too runny receive poor grades.

  4. See the Zubbles video by vistic · · Score: 3, Interesting

    They have a video on their website of what these things look like:

    http://www.zubbles.com/flash/ZubblesVideoPlayer2.s wf