Popular Science has a wonderful feature about colored bubbles. The
inventor, Tim Kehoe, spent 11 years figuring out a way to make bubbles
with color that disappeared after the pop.
And
then the bubbles broke—on the kids, on the parents, on cars, on
Haddleton's prized German Shepherds. It looked like there had been a
paint fight. Kehoe had told the parents that the color would wash out,
but it didn't matter. Not when their children were covered head to toe
in blue and pink splotches, when the color was getting into their shoes
and hair and soaking into the concrete. In the faces of the horrified
mothers, Kehoe immediately grasped the lesson. “You can't go to market
with something that leaves that much color, even if it is washable,” he
says. “It freaks people out.”
Kehore partnered with a chemist and hundreds of experiments later,
built a “dye molecule from an unstable base structure called a lactone
ring…” Okay, but what you really need to know is that Zubbles should
be available in stores come February. And Kehoe is working on some new
potential uses for his disappearing colors: vanishing hair dye, soap,
toothpaste, even temporary wall paints.
The 11-Year Quest to Create Disappearing Colored Bubbles [Popular Science]
[Thanks Joshua!] [Gizmodo]