Zubbles!!

I just descoved zubbles and I'm excited!

it took tom 10 years and a half million dollars to create and it's colored bubbles!

Bubble boy Ram Sabnis helped an inventor complete his decade-long quest to create a new kids’ toy: the first bubbles with disappearing color, so they won’t stain your kids or your floor (see photos). Like sticky notes, their impermanence is their selling point (via Boing Boing). I knew that textile industry would come in handy someday!

Ram Sabnis is a leader among a very small group of people who can
point to a dye-chemistry Ph.D. on their wall. Only a handful of
universities in the world offer one, and none are in the U.S. (Sabnis
got his in Bombay). He holds dozens of patents from his work in
semiconductors (dying silicon) and biotechnology (dying nucleic acids)…

Sabnis
told them he’d have it ready to market in a year… “This is the most
difficult project I have ever worked on,” Sabnis says now… For months,
he ran 60 to 100 experiments a week, filling notebooks with sketches of
molecules, spending weekends in the library studying surfactant
chemistry, trying one class of dyes after another…

He
synthesized a dye that would bond to the surfactants in a bubble to
give it bright, vivid color but would also lose its color with
friction, water or exposure to air… go away completely, as though it
had never been there. When one of these bubbles breaks on your hand,
rub your hands together a few times and look: Poof. Magic. No more
color… [Link]

Ah, lactone rings. Why didn’t I think of that

Sabnis’s solution was to build a dye molecule from an unstable base
structure called a lactone ring that functions much like a box. When
the ring is open, the molecule absorbs all visible light save for one
color—the color of the bubble. But add air, water or pressure, and the
box closes, changing the molecule’s structure so that it lets visible
light pass straight through. Sabnis builds each hue by adding different
chemical groups onto this base.

“Nobody has made this chemistry before,” Sabnis says. “All these
molecules—we will make 200 or 300 to cover the spectrum—they don’t
exist. We have synthesized a whole new class of dyes…” [Link]

There are many other potential applications besides bubbles:

Among the ideas Kehoe has already mocked up are a finger paint that
fades from every surface except a special paper, a hair dye that
vanishes in a few hours, and disappearing-graffiti
spray paint. There’s a toothpaste that would turn kids’ mouths a bright
color until they had brushed for the requisite 30 seconds, and a soap
that would do the same for hand washing.

He’s also thinking outside the toy chest, mucking around in
the lab on weekends making things like a Swiffer that leaves a
momentary trace showing where you’ve Swiffered and a temporary wall
paint that would let you spend a few hours with a color before
committing to it. [Link]