Ten Weirdly Useful Scientific Facts About Bubbles

As a child, you might have spent hours playing with bubbles: blowing them, chasing after them, maybe even jumping up and popping a few. But as adults, how often do we think about bubbles? Well, it turns out we should probably be paying them a lot more attention, because these pockets of gas are far more intriguing and useful than most people think.

Scientists have left coded messages in ice bubbles, turned soapy foam into lasers, and even created bizarre antibubbles in space. Great minds like Da Vinci stopped to ponder bubbles, and even he could not quite get his head around them. From quantum flashes to galactic giants, here are ten scientific facts that show just how handy bubbles can be.

Related: 10 Curious Musical Compositions Created by Science and Technology

10 MIT Bubble Wrap Extracts Drinking Water from the Air

When you think of bubble wrap, visions of wrapping delicate items might spring to mind. You might think of the satisfying popping noises from bursting row after row of tiny lumps. However, researchers at MIT looked at bubble wrap and came up with a novel way of collecting drinking water in harsh climates.

The team says its bubble-based harvester works in areas where atmospheric moisture is present—even in the arid dunes of Death Valley. A specialized material known as hydrogel sucks the water vapor out of the atmosphere at night. It creates a series of repeating domes that look like a sheet of bubble wrap.

The bubbles swell up as the substance soaks up water. The absorbent gel is squashed between two layers of glass. The water condenses on the glass by day and is collected by a series of tubes. No electricity is needed to power it.

Scientists tested the invention for a week in California’s Death Valley. Each day, it extracted enough water to fill around two-thirds of a cup (57–161.5 milliliters). Based on these results, the MIT team reckons that several panels of high-tech bubble wrap should be able to supply a household with drinking water in any part of the world where it is difficult to come by.^[1]

9 Quantum Physics Explains Why Popping Bubbles Sometimes Emit Light

Believe it or not, some bubbles emit a flash of light when they burst. The effect is known as sonoluminescence. Scientists blast sound at a tiny bubble of gas until it implodes, sending out pulses of high-energy bluish light. Certain species of mantis shrimp have a similar impact on air bubbles in water.

Experts are still unable to explain the exact science behind sonoluminescence, but they know that quantum physics plays a role. Bubbles collapse in a shimmer of light particles known as photons. Researchers studied the patterns created by these photons and found them to be quantum in nature.

They hope to harness this effect to come up with a cheaper and more efficient way of producing quantum light. That said, there is still much to learn before scientists fully understand the enigma that is sonoluminescence.^[2]

8 Coded Messages Can Be Frozen in Ice Bubbles

Scientists have come up with all kinds of bizarre and imaginative ideas for how to store secret messages. Bubbles are no exception. In the bracing cold around the Earth’s poles, people can pass on coded notes using air bubbles in the ice. By altering the size, shape, and position of the bubbles, the communicator can spell out a message in binary or Morse code.

Scientists in Beijing first introduced the idea in a 2025 paper in the journal Cell Reports Physical Science. The team was inspired by the air bubbles that form naturally in glaciers. They claim their new bubble system can be used to store strings of information for long stretches of time in the ice.

“In naturally cold regions, the use of trapped air bubbles as a means of message delivery and storage uses less energy than telecommunication and is more covert than paper documents,” explained mechanical engineer Mengjie Song. “These ice messages can be preserved for a long time, and the messages they carry are easy to visualize and read.”^[3]

7 Experts Solve 500-Year-Old Mystery That Even Da Vinci Could Not Crack

Some of the greatest minds that ever lived have pondered the nature of bubbles. Leonardo da Vinci sometimes mused over bubbles, describing them in his sketchbooks as “a tiny cloud shielding a mathematical singularity.”

Though Da Vinci revolutionized the way we see the world, some things were beyond even his comprehension. One of those was fizzy liquids. The renowned thinker could not work out why bubbles rise at different speeds depending on their size. The smaller bubbles bolt to the top, while the bigger ones bob back and forth as they meander upward.

So why do fizzy liquids act this way? It took over half a millennium for scientists to answer that question. They set to work measuring the radii of bubbles in water, then built a computer model using equations for incompressible fluids. The team realized that when spherical bubbles ascend, they begin to flatten at the top. For the larger bubbles, this causes a tiny vortex to form underneath, which causes them to tilt and float back and forth on their way up.^[4]

6 Antibubbles–a Cool Little Trick or the Future of Drug Delivery?

Bubbles are fascinating things, as this list shows—found everywhere from the deepest oceans to the most exotic far-off planets. But how about an antibubble? It might sound like something from a low-budget science fiction show, but bubbles have a strange yet surprisingly useful counterpart.

A bubble, in its most basic form, is a pocket of gas enclosed in a film of liquid. An antibubble is the opposite—a pocket of fluid surrounded by gas.

Antibubbles are easier to create than you might think. You can whip up a cluster in a bowl of soapy water. Just release some water droplets from a small height above the surface. Turbulent flow forms a thin coat of air around the droplet, and an antibubble is born.

Scientists have tried to reproduce the same effect using liquid drops and hot oil. But NASA’s Don Pettit wanted to take antibubbles further than anyone had before. In 2012, he created an anti-bubble in orbit on board the International Space Station. He then used a syringe to inject air into the large sphere of water, which resulted in a bubble within an antibubble.

This might sound like a nifty demonstration, but experts say that antibubbles could have great medical benefits. As scientists wrote in a 2022 paper, “The distinct structure of antibubbles makes them quite attractive for drug and therapeutic delivery.” The main barrier at the moment is that they do not last very long. Antibubbles usually burst after a few minutes or hours.^[5]

5 Enormous Bubbles Imaged on Massive Red Giant Star

One hundred eighty light-years from Earth lies a giant star that releases enormous bubbles of gas. The cosmic fizz reaches sizes 75 times larger than the Sun. These ginormous gas pockets occur on the red giant R Doradus, found in the Dorado constellation. The fiery colossus is nearing the end of its life and starting to expand outward.

Huge, searing gas bubbles pop up all across the surface of R Doradus. In 2024, astronomers released images of the gargantuan stellar froth—the first time scientists have imaged bubbles like that on a star that isn’t the Sun. They took the photo using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, a sophisticated network of radio telescopes in Chile.

Scientists say that by watching red giants like R Doradus, they gain a better understanding of how our Sun will behave when it starts to bloom and consume planets in five billion years.^[6]

4 Scientists Unwrap the Mystery of Champagne Bubbles

If you have ever knocked back a few glasses of champagne, you might have noticed the distinct way that it feels on the tongue. Unlike other fizzy drinks, the bubbles in champagne float smoothly to the top in straight, regular lines. So why does this happen? The secret lies in a type of soapy molecule known as a surfactant.

Champagne, prosecco, and sparkling wines are all packed with more surfactants than other drinks. Scientists say the proteins add some of that delicious flavor to the drinks, as well as driving the uniform bubble chains. Researchers from the U.S. and France even injected a lager with surfactants, and the beer started fizzing like a glass of bubbly.

Research into champagne bubble trails might not seem like the most cutting-edge science, but the team says their findings could be used in industry. For example, it could help with methane and carbon dioxide pouring out of deep-sea vents or monitoring tanks for water treatment.^[7]

3 Researchers Turn Soap Bubbles into Lasers

Another discovery that sounds like something from the realm of science fiction. In 2024, physicists in Slovenia found a mind-bending way to turn soap bubbles into lasers. They created soap bubbles only a few millimeters in diameter, then mixed in a fluorescent dye. The team blasted the colored spheres with laser pulses, and the bubbles began to glow.

Scientists found that the bubbles emitted different wavelengths of light depending on their size. They hope to harness this effect to build bubble-based sensors that can pick up small alterations in pressure or an electric field.

The team now aims to repeat the experiment using bubbles made from smectic liquid crystals rather than soapy foam. Soap bubbles have a short lifespan. Scientists say the smectic bubbles are much more stable and less prone to wavelength overlap.^[8]

2 Ginormous Cosmic Bubble Is Possibly Left Over from the Big Bang

In the depths of the cosmos lurks a giant bubble that astronomers believe could be remnants from the Big Bang billions of years ago. The enigmatic orb is almost a billion light-years wide, which means it would take light a billion years to travel from one side to the other. Scientists spotted the gargantuan sphere 820 million light-years from the Milky Way. They named it Ho’oleilana.

Researchers believe that the mysterious structure is something known as a baryon acoustic oscillation. In the early stages of the universe, pressure waves often thundered across the primordial soup. At that stage, everything was a dense, superheated mixture of particles. As the cosmos cooled, the waves became frozen in place. The universe is constantly expanding, pushed outward by dark energy. As the cosmos grows, these frozen oscillations are stretched and swell to enormous sizes.

Ho’oleilana is a massive bubble, far bigger than scientists expected. This suggests that the universe is inflating at a faster rate than experts thought. Astronomers also hope that further study of the orb can help shed light on the long-standing enigma of dark energy.^[9]

1 Humpback Whales Use Bubbles to Communicate, Even with Humans

Marine mammals are more intelligent than we often give them credit for. Humpback whales are nifty creatures when it comes to bubbles. They create huge bubble rings in the water to help hunt prey. Males will also show off their skills, churning up a vortex of foam when competing to woo a female. They have even been spotted creating bubble rings to help defend other species from predator attacks.

Now, researchers say they could also be using their bubble structures to try to communicate with humans. Whales are often playful and curious when they encounter a boat or a human swimmer, sometimes blowing bubble rings in their direction. A 2025 study in Marine Mammal Science posits the idea that humpbacks behave this way to try to reach out to humans.

Scientists studied nearly 40 rings made by 11 whales covering a range of ages. None of the humpbacks were hostile to the incoming humans. In most cases, the mammals displayed no feeding behavior and were alone, which suggests they were not trying to hunt prey or communicate with a nearby pal.

“We’ve now located a dozen whales from populations around the world,” explained study author Jodi Frediani, “the majority of which have voluntarily approached boats and swimmers blowing bubble rings during these episodes of curious behavior.”^[10]