How fun! Let's make the Web 2.0 bubble blue and the housing bubble red
Adding color to bubbles -- sounds easy enough. Some bubble solution. A little bit of food dye. Simple, right? Not at all. Turns out coloring bubbles is an exceptionally difficult bit of chemistry. Just ask toy inventor Tim Kehoe, who spent 11 years and half a million dollars developing nonstaining colored bubbles -- one of the toy industry's long-sought tech breakthroughs. His secret:
a new water-soluble disappearing dye capable of coloring the very thin wall of a bubble
. Popular Science explains: "[The] dye molecule [is built] 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."
