Bubbles. Whether in a jacuzzi or being blown into your eyeballs by a child, you’ve got to love them. And behind the general aesthetics, they’re pretty interesting physically.
For a time, they were even used to model atomic behavior, with “bubble rafts” on a water surface creating a surprisingly good analog of the structure of atoms in metals.
There are some pretty interesting bubble types out there, and some equally interesting effects. Nanobubbles, for example, have been found to be surprisingly stable and long-lived, puzzling scientists slightly, who predicted they would collapse quite quickly.
Then there is the slightly baffling phenomenon of sonoluminescence, whereby popping bubbles being excited by sound can sometimes emit light.
But you are probably here to learn about antibubbles. While bubbles are pockets of gas surrounded by a liquid layer, antibubbles are pockets of liquid, surrounded by a layer of gas. If that’s not spicy enough for you, here is NASA Astronaut Don Pettit creating a bubble within an antibubble in space.
You do not need to be in space to create antibubbles, however; simply dropping water into a bowl of soapy water from slightly above the surface will do it. Get it right, and the turbulent flow can create a pocket of air around the liquid. Voilà: you have yourself an antibubble.
While regular bubbles are useful medically, and could be used in certain cancer treatments, the use of antibubbles is less widespread.
“The distinct structure of antibubbles makes them quite attractive for drug and therapeutic delivery, although their potential applications have not been realized so far,” one review explains. “The major challenge in this regard is a short-lived span of antibubbles, which is usually in the order of a few minutes to a few hours based on the stabilization mechanism used.”
However, recent efforts to create longer-lived antibubbles by dropping warmed-up liquid into hot oil has shown some promise. Maybe one day, antibubbles will be used in medicine alongside their less evil twin.
