Seawater froths and foams in ways that freshwater rarely does. A new study pinpoints the ocean’s electrolytes as the reason bubbles resist merging there. By studying the final moments before Keep reading
Tag: foam
Stabilizing Foams
Bubbles in a pure liquid don’t last long, but with added surfactants or multiple miscible liquids, bubbles can form long-lasting foams. In soapy foams, surfactants provide the surface tension gradients Keep reading
Simulating Better Breaking Waves
In the ocean, breaking waves trap air into bubbles that then cluster into foam, but conventional simulations don’t capture this foaminess. For bubbles to cluster into foam, there has to Keep reading
Sliding Foams
What happens when a foam interacts with a sliding surface? That’s the question at the heart of this study, which finds three major regimes of foam-surface interaction. On smooth surfaces Keep reading
Tapping a Can Won’t Save Your Beer
It happens to the best of us: sometimes our beer gets shaken up during transit. One common reaction to this is to tap the side of the can repeatedly before Keep reading
Active Foam
Geometrically, biological tissues and two-dimensional layers of foam share a lot of similarities. To try and understand how active changes in one cell affect neighbors, researchers are studying how foams Keep reading
Foam Collapse
Introduce the right additive and the bubble arrays in foam will collapse catastrophically. What you see above is high-speed video of a quasi-two-dimensional soap bubble foam collapsing. There are two Keep reading
Finding New Shapes in Foam
In the summer of 2018, a group of researchers announced they’d discovered a new geometrical shape, the scutoid. They found the scutoid, a sort of twisted prism, in the shape Keep reading
Foam and Flow
Fluid dynamics often play out on a scale that’s difficult to appreciate from our earthbound perspective, but fortunately, we have tools to aid us. This natural-color satellite image shows Rupert Keep reading
What Keeps a Foam Intact
Beer, soda, soap, meringue – foams are everywhere in our lives. But have you ever wondered why some foams disappear so quickly while whipped egg whites stick around? That’s the Keep reading