The seas’ most sought-after fish are swimming between a rock and a hard place: the fisherman’s net and an encroaching mass of suffocating water.

A recent study has uncovered a new dose of bad news for ocean fish and the fishing industry. Areas of the deep ocean with little dissolved oxygen, called dead zones, are expanding and, thus, shrinking many fishes’ watery homes.

One driving force behind the predicament is none other than that pesky climate problem.

“Climate change is actually working in tandem with overexploitation of the animals to push these populations into a real dangerous place in terms of population collapse,” said Eric Prince, a fisheries biologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Southeast Fisheries Science Center and co-author of the study.

For example, Prince and his colleagues calculated that the Atlantic blue marlin, an economically valuable fish that was a focus of their study, has lost about 15 percent of its habitat from expanding dead zones since 1960. Dwindling habitat threatens not only the lives of fishes, but also the sustainability of the already ailing fishing industry.

Breathing room

Like their above-water brethren, fish need oxygen, which is dissolved in the water. Big, predatory fish, such as the blue marlin, need more dissolved oxygen than most, because they require lots of energy to grow and survive. Without sufficient oxygen, they’ll suffocate.

The level of oxygen in the water thus partly delineates fish habitat boundaries. Dead zones often draw these borders.

As climate change causes open ocean dead zones to balloon, fish habitat deflates.

Diagram modified from one originally published in Deep Sea Research Part I: Oceanographic Research Papers, Vol 57, Issue 4, Lothar Stramma, Sunke Schmidtko, Lisa A. Levin, & Gregory C. Johnson. Ocean oxygen minima expansions and their biological impacts, 587-595, Copyright Elsevier (2010).

Technically known as oxygen minimum zones, dead zones are actually a natural occurrence. Found at depths of between 200 and 1000 meters, they are caused partly by seawater circulation and partly by the decomposition of organic matter, namely deceased sea critters that sink from surface waters.

As aerobic bacteria nosh on the organic matter, they use up the oxygen in the water. Eventually, hypoxia happens—the water becomes so depleted of oxygen that many creatures can’t survive.

Since deep-sea dead zones are insulated from the ocean’s surface, where the water borrows oxygen from the atmosphere, they can only reload with oxygen if currents make a long-distance delivery, according to Sunke Schmidtko, an oceanographer at the University of East Anglia, the other co-author of the study.

Deep-sea dead zones are different from their coastal cousins like the one in the Gulf of Mexico. Coastal dead zones form due to a buildup of agricultural fertilizer that rivers, such as the Mississippi, collect and then flush out to sea, causing abnormal blooms of plant life.

De-fizzing the ocean

But climate change is turning what Mother Nature does normally into a big problem. As the air is getting hotter, so is the water, and warmer water can hold less oxygen than colder water.

This is similar to what happens to a soft drink on a hot day. After sitting in the heat and sun, the fizz fizzles, and you are left with a flat, carbon dioxide-depleted beverage.

Also, warmer surface waters are less likely to sink to the ocean’s lower layers, because warm water is lighter than the colder water below, Schmidtko explained. In other words, as the oxygen-rich surface layers heat up, they could have a harder time delivering oxygen to the deeper ocean.

Schmidtko clarified that oceanographers are still trying to determine how exactly climate change is affecting the ocean, but with their knowledge of how water works, these represent their current speculations.

The rock below

With less oxygen to go around, oxygen minimum zones are swelling and intruding on many fishes’ living zones.

For example, marlins often dive deep to feed, sometimes as far down as 800 meters. However, in the eastern Atlantic’s growing dead zone, which is already one of the largest in the world, Prince found that marlins can’t dive as deep as their west-side counterparts.

“They need to go where the food is and where they can breathe,” he said.

With less breathing room below, the floor of their habitat rises, and they are pinned to the surface layers. With nowhere to go but up, marlins become squished into tighter, testier quarters with other predatory fish and their prey. They also find it harder to dodge a waiting fishing hook or net.

“Concentrating them makes it much easier for overexploitation by [humans],” said Prince.

The increasing concentration of animals at the top could also lead to a boost in the amount of sinking organic matter, which would further worsen the oxygen shortage below.

Softening the hard place above

As a prized catch, Atlantic blue marlins are already victims of overharvesting. In fact, their populations have dropped 60-64 percent over the past three fish generations (14-18 years).

But the growing dead zones can actually fool scientists and fishermen into thinking fish populations are doing just fine, since more fish are squeezed into a smaller area. Thus, to ensure the dead zone-fishing vise does not become their demise, Prince said scientists must more carefully monitor fish populations, as well as the expansion of the dead zones.

While fish stock assessments are starting to incorporate this information, Prince warned the pace needs to quicken.

And if the Earth is to continue warming, as most scientists predict, Schmidtko added that humans should chill out on fishing.

After all, we will never be capable of “ventilating the ocean,” he said.

On May 4, scientists announced success after a 50-year quest to measure two key consequences of Einstein’s theory of general relativity. The most perfectly round objects ever created by human hand, spinning aboard a spaceship launched in 2004, have detected infinitesimal disturbances in spacetime, the invisible fourth dimension of the universe:

To The Why Files, frame-dragging means that space is no longer flat, or even just warped. It is also twisted. And as a matter of principle, The Why Files likes twisted.

These consequences of predictions made in the early 20th century by history’s archetypal theoretical physicist are yet more proof that Einstein had it right, and are the latest chapters in history’s most compelling scientific detective story; which substantiated the highly theoretical speculation of a brilliant scientist through nuts-and-bolts observations of the universe.

Courtesy Eric Zuelow, University of New England

Is this tyke being “frame-dragged” in accordance with Einstein’s general theory of relativity, or is he just playing in a park in Kenilworth, England?

1905: Relatively special

In 1905, the same year he finished his Ph.D. thesis, Einstein published several amazing insights, including papers on Brownian motion and the photoelectric effect (the latter won Einstein his sole Nobel Prize). One of those papers proposed a theory of “special relativity” that said that the speed of light is fixed and independent of the observer’s motion. The 1887 Michelson-Morley experiment convinced Einstein that there was no ether (the supposed physical background that allowed light to move), and that the laws of physics were the same in reference frames moving with a constant velocity relative to each other.

Common sense says that a ball thrown from a moving car will move faster than one thrown by a person standing still – and still faster for someone in another car driving towards it. Common sense, Einstein proved, does not always apply. The speed of light does not depend on whether the light source is mounted on a Stanley Steamer, a space ship or a water tower. The speed of light is constant. And it doesn’t matter whence you observe it. Light speed is light speed. End of story.

Image: FL0

Using a device like this, Michelson and Morley found that light had the same velocity under different circumstances; a key stimulus to Einstein’s thoughts while working on special relativity.

1916: General relativity

Einstein’s theory of “general” relativity described how gravity affects space and time. Following his habit, Einstein started a thought experiment — a series of “what-if” questions – related to gravity: “If I were falling through space, I would not feel gravity.” Therefore, the laws of physics did not require gravity in every situation. But since the laws of physics must apply everywhere, then gravity must result from something else, which Einstein concluded was the fabric of spacetime.

The classic explanation for spacetime is this: gravity results when the curved fabric of spacetime causes a massive object (a bowling ball or a galaxy) to distort space-time, causing other objects to fall toward the “valley” it has created in spacetime. To us, this looks like gravity, but to Einstein, it’s more a matter of geometry.

1906: Working on the proof

One year after Einstein published special relativity, scientists got some support for the theory, says Richard Staley, an associate professor of the history of science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Einstein and others had predicted, for different reasons, that certain fast-moving electrons would gain mass. German physicist Walter Kaufmann did some experiments, and interpreted his results as proof that the mass gain was due to a competing theory rather than relativity, but “the tests were not accurate enough to make a decisive choice between the different theories,” Staley says.

1919: Sun’s gravity bends light

The first confirmation of general relativity appeared after a highly publicized journey by British astronomer Arthur Eddington. During a total solar eclipse, Eddington observed stars that were almost directly behind the sun. As predicted by general relativity, their starlight was bent by the sun’s gravity.

Gravity, counter to intuition, could bend light, and Eddington, no dunce, became an ardent popularizer of relativity.

Although we may look back on Einstein as an oddball with a zany haircut who stuck out his tongue and rode a bike, he was a serious man who thought about politics as well as physics. Living in Germany during World War I, he was an outspoken pacifist who organized scientists against militarism. “Einstein thought we needed to think across national borders and tried to start a book project to include contributions from people from neutral and enemy countries,” Staley notes. “Most of his colleagues said it was a great idea, but would be counterproductive. They refused to participate, so it did not happen.”

Even before his fame got a boost by the 1919 confirmation of relativity, Einstein was willing to “take stances counter to others,” Staley says. “He was cautioned about going public, but when the war was finished, he decided he’d been right. Even though physics does not give you a particular insight into politics, it was clear that nobody had better insights, so he might as well make his views public.”

1974: Neutron stars and gravity waves

By the 1920s and ’30s, relativity was enshrined as a foundation of physics, but the proofs rolled on. In 1974, researchers found that a pair of neutron stars — phenomenally dense objects formed after regular stars collapse — was losing energy. Neutron stars emit extremely regular radio pulses, and the slowing of the pulses was interpreted to mean they were losing energy through the gravitational waves that general relativity predicts. The discovery won the 1993 Nobel Prize for physics.

Detecting gravity waves remains the object of an expensive, long-term scientific quest.

1979: One weighty lens

In 1936, three years after Einstein emigrated to the United States to escape the Nazis, he predicted that immense gravitation would bend light rather like a lens. Contemporary telescopes were unable to find such a “gravitational lens,” but in 1979, astronomers noticed two surprisingly similar images of a distant quasar and concluded that they were looking at a double image of one giant light source, split in two by a cluster of galaxies along the sight path to Earth.

“As usual, Einstein was ahead of the curve,” Harvard historian of science Gerald Holton told The Why Files in 1997. In 2006, a single quasar appeared in five individual images, again due to the gravity of an intervening cluster of galaxies.

Apparently a trillion stars, more or less, will do strange things…

1997: Neutron stars and frame-dragging

Although the 2011 report from Gravity Probe B was the first to identify “frame-dragging” of spacetime due to Earth’s mass, in 1997, scientists reported that rotating black holes and neutron stars were frame-dragging. The study, by Wei Cui at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, found that the gravity of a black hole spinning several thousand of times per second was distorting spacetime into a funnel shape. “It’s a very abstract thing,” Cui told us.

Black holes are extraordinarily dense points in space with a super-intense gravity that even traps light. Their presence can be deduced from a shower of X-rays produced as matter falls into the hole.

Scientists have long accepted that massive objects distort spacetime much as a bowling ball would distort a web of fabric that supports it. But frame-dragging means a rotating mass has some “sticky” quality that drags spacetime, and frame-dragging was more proof that Einstein was right, Cui said. “These are all results of his theory of general relativity, which described gravity.” In other words, gravity becomes a property of spacetime. “You can take all the facts of gravity and explain them with a certain geometry of spacetime.”

1995: The ultimate chill-out

Back in 1925, when “automobile” meant model A, and “president” meant “Silent Cal” Coolidge, Einstein predicted that a strange phase of matter would exist near absolute zero, a frosty -273°C. Expanding upon the calculations of Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose, Einstein calculated that atoms would enter a unified quantum-mechanical state near the coldest possible temperature.

The atoms would become a drill sergeant’s dream — identical in mind and body.

What was dubbed the “Bose-Einstein condensate” would also be a new phase of matter. Since only four phases exist in the universe — gas, liquid, solid and plasma — discovering another phase would pump up a resume.
In 1995, Carl Wieman, a professor of physics at the University of Colorado, and colleague Eric Cornell fulfilled Einstein’s prediction by creating this bizarre phase of matter at just 200-billionths of a degree Celsius above absolute zero. As Wieman told us in 1997, “We wanted to see if real atoms could ever match the ideal system that Einstein was considering, and they did match — really quite nicely.”

Quantum mechanics says that atoms can exist in certain energy states, but not in between. A group of atoms occupies numerous energy states, washing out the quantum-mechanical effects, but in a Bose-Einstein condensate, Wieman said, “You have a bunch of atoms in a single quantum state, obeying the laws of quantum mechanics as a whole. Traditionally, to see a quantum state, you had to look inside a single atom. Now we can look at millions of atoms.”

2011: Sweet success smiles on Gravity Probe B

The insights of the former Swiss patent clerk are impossible to exaggerate, but it took a lot of technical sophistication and ingenuity to detect disturbances in spacetime in the vicinity of Earth. That was the goal of Gravity Probe B.

Francis Everitt, a Stanford University physicist who has devoted his career to sailing Gravity Probe B across technological and financial shoals, compares the “dragging” of spacetime to a giant pot of honey. “As the planet rotated its axis and orbited the Sun, the honey around it would warp and swirl, and it’s the same with space and time.”

Save for the effects of gravity and relativity, the high-tech gyroscopes aboard the spaceship should point forever in one direction. Instead, gravity changes their orientation in subtle but measurable ways.

The rotors in those gyroscopes are the most precise spheres ever manufactured, which is astonishing if you consider that they were measured with “micro-inches” rather than microns.

It is not necessary  to offer a practical justification for a proof of relativity – simply explaining the universe is ample. But Gary Shiu, a professor of physics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, notes that the ultra-precise equipment crafted for the gravity probe helped improve global positioning systems and the gizmos used to map the microwave background radiation that was created shortly after the Big Bang and still pervades the cosmos. “These technologies have already been developed, the spinoff already proven,” Shiu says.

Although some of the previous proofs of general relativity could conceivably be explained with alternate theories, Shiu says, “The frame-dragging detected in Gravity Probe B provides yet another independent test that any alternative to Einstein’s general relativity would have to meet.”

A man apart

A theory must explain the working of some aspect of nature, and it must be tested, generally by trying to disprove its predictions. Does your theory say gravity is an attraction between any two objects? Then, if you can find objects that fail to attract, you need to revise or reject your theory.

After a century of confirmation of Einstein, the obvious remaining question concerns scientific creativity rather than physics: What was Einstein’s secret? “He was very persistent, was the prototypical scientist,” says Shiu, who helped organize an upcoming conference on Cosmology since Einstein. “When he wanted to solve a problem, he could take 10 or 20 years. We cannot figure out the answer in a few months or years, we need to do whatever it takes to solve the problem.”

Kip Thorne, a California Institute of Technology physicist, told us in 1997 that he attributed Einstein’s deep insight to his “conviction that the universe loves simplicity and beauty… His willingness to be guided by this conviction, even if it meant destroying the foundations of Newtonian physics, led him, with a clarity of thought that others could not match, to his new description of space and time. … All new laws that have been successful in describing the real universe have turned out to obey Einstein’s principle of relativity.”

Indeed, Thorne called relativity a kind of super-law that “must be obeyed by all laws of physics, no matter whether they are laws governing electricity and magnetism, or atoms and molecules, or steam engines and sports cars.”

Gerald Holton, a physicist and historian of science at Harvard University, pointed to several characteristics that helped Einstein ^{1 2} excel:

Beyond a unique ability to peer inside the universe, Holton says Einstein also wrote about his philosophy and technique. “This man allowed himself to be more public and frank, and in particular about his scientific method, which is very much the method still used by other physicists.”

Yet for all his brilliance, Einstein failed to find the holy Grail of physics –a “grand unified theory” to explain all four physical forces. Electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces are explained by a single theory called the “standard model,” but to this day, gravitation stands stubbornly apart.

Summing up? Einstein

Einstein’s revolutionary theories grew from his philosophy of nature and insistence that physical laws must be true on Earth, space ships and stars, combined with a phenomenal intuition for nature and enough self-confidence to rewrite Newton’s laws of gravitation and motion. Einstein interpreted experiments from the 1880s, which suggested that the speed of light was independent of the observer’s motion, as meaning that the speed of light is constant throughout the universe. He then proposed that mass would affect light and spacetime, which is the backdrop for all events, atomic, human, cosmic and comic.

Still, everybody makes mistakes. Einstein denied the existence of black holes and loathed the role of chance in quantum theory, saying “God does not play dice with the universe.” He also cooked up a “cosmological constant” because his theories implied that the universe was changing size, which he considered too weird to be true.

When astronomer Edwin Hubble proved that the universe was expanding, Einstein called the cosmo constant “the greatest blunder of his life.” And yet recent discoveries indicating that the universe is, for unknown reasons, expanding ever faster could mean that his “greatest blunder” was not that far off…

Although Newtonian physics still describes what we see every day, more than a century after the young patent clerk brutally shouldered Newton aside, there’s no question Einstein grasped the big picture. And that returns us to this simple question: “How did he do the things he did?”

“Einstein was typically working between several different theoretical approaches,” says Staley, the science historian. “He was looking for places in which the best laws we currently have fail or don’t provide clear guidance, and then was trying to use those critical gaps to provide new insight into connections between different areas. People often think he thought outside the box. I think he thought across several boxes, and saw ways to link theory that others did not recognize. Although others were also looking at the limits of theory and trying to unify different areas, he did it better.”

For decades, scientists have thought that the pre-historic Antarctic climate was governed by events at the other end of the planet — in the Arctic. That’s because variations in solar radiation in the northern summer tracked nicely with the temperature record from sediment cores and ice cores taken on or around Antarctica.

Our record of temperatures in the deep south is carried in the ratios of oxygen and hydrogen isotopes (atoms with different masses) contained in ice cores. But Thomas Laepple, of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Germany, has just published an article maintaining that because the Antarctic ice cores did not accumulate at a steady pace, they have not been interpreted correctly.

Today, more snow (the source of ice), gathers in winter. Because that likely also happened in the past, ice cores from Antarctic tell us more about winter than summer, says Laepple.

And God created winter!

Photo 1: Hans Oerter, Alfred Wegener Institute, Germany, Photo 2: Eric Cravens, National Ice Core Lab

This 150,000-year-old piece of Antarctic ice is 10 centimeters in diameter, and was taken from a depth of 2,250 meters. After researchers clean, measure and catalog this core, it may be stored in a giant freezer like the one in the next image (rollover).

When Laepple and his colleagues factored in this seasonal effect, the level of sunlight in the southern hemisphere suddenly began to explain Antarctic temperatures. Although the orbital cycles still globally affect solar radiation, there was no longer a need to look at the other end of the Earth to explain rhythms in Antarctic temperatures.

The orbital cycles in question are named for Serbian engineer Milutin Milankovitch, who, about a century ago, sought to understand how three slow shifts in Earth’s orbit would affect the amount of sunshine in different regions, different seasons and years.

These orbital variations, which are influenced by gravity of the moon, sun, Jupiter and Saturn, are the basis of the “Milankovitch cycle:”

As scientists examined ocean sediments and then ice cores, the Milankovitch influence on solar radiation in the Northern hemisphere became the accepted explanation for the changing global climate. But when Laepple factored in the seasonal nature of Antarctic snowfall, he found that Milankovitch could explain the climate on the southern continent more directly. “I don’t question that the Milankovitch cycle has an influence on climate,” says Laepple, “but I question that its influence on the Antarctic is coming through the Artic.”

The adjustment was needed because more ice accumulates during winter and does not affect the overall climate record, Laepple says, “but it completely changes the recording of the signal stemming from the precession of the earth axis, which was the evidence for the remote North-South connection.”

Photo 1: Steven Profaizer, Photo 2: Sepp Kipfstuhl, Alfred Wegener Institute, Germany

Scientists use massive drills to uncover the stories about past climates told in ice cores (roll over for to see a core from a depth of 2,668 meters).

How would you explain it?

Climate is never simple, notes Richard Alley, a climate expert and professor of earth science at Penn State, who was not involved in the research. The Milankovitch cycle, he says, “shifts sunshine around on the planet, with more in some places and less in others, changing the length of seasons, the total sunshine during seasons … so it is not surprising that multiple hypotheses can be advanced to explain a given climate record. Ultimately, the mere fact of correlation is not the answer; we seek understanding of the physical linkages. … The new paper provides a clever new idea for a physical linkage, and I anticipate it will get people discussing and studying.”

Any new study concerning climate processes could get sucked into the political vortex enmiring global warming, so we asked if Laepple’s study of Antarctic conditions should lead us to question the widely-accepted theory that burning fossil fuels and changing land use have altered the climate.

Laepple reminded us that he’s studying changes that occur over periods of 10,000 years. He also insists that the new analysis “will not change the basic record of glacial and interglacial periods — the march of ice ages over the past million years. We are focusing on the precession cycle [the 21,000-year cycle affecting the location of Earth's axis], as this provides the evidence showing where and how the climate is affected by radiation changes, and might hold the key to the mechanism of slow climate change.”

Years ago, scientists began to revise their interpretation of Greenland ice to account for the seasonality in snowfall, Laepple says. “This new study is part of a long discussion. As we interpret the climate record, we have to focus more on how the climate signal gets recorded in the climate record.”

Whether it’s beer or soap, soup or suds, bubbles are a fact of life. These evanescent but ubiquitous structures posed a perfect challenge for James Bird, who has just received his PhD from Harvard University. “Bubbles are fun, but the dynamics are fast enough that you have to use high speed cameras, and the visual aspect appeals to me,” Bird says.

Bubbles matter in realms ranging from medicine to climate. But until now, nobody knew that when larger bubbles break, they spawn smaller bubbles. Even stranger, as Bird and his graduate advisor Howard Stone, who is now at Princeton University, have found, these “daughter” bubbles can even spawn “granddaughter” bubbles.

This chain reaction only occurs when many factors, like bubble size and liquid viscosity, are correct.

Suitably, Bird says the bubble study arose when he and co-author Laurent Courbin were “playing in the lab late one night, trying to get a bubble to spread on different surfaces, but instead this hemispheric bubble would pop to create a ring of daughter bubbles. We looked at each other and were not sure what was going on.”

As Bird recalls, “Howard gave me permission to have fun and see if I could figure it out.”

Tense at the surface

The major physical force at work in the bubbles is surface tension – the same phenomenon that causes water to creep up the side of a glass. Surface tension occurs because smaller surfaces have lower energy, so stretchy materials like films and balloons tend to adopt a shape with the smallest area.

Surface tension forms spherical bubbles because spheres have the smallest area for any given volume of fluid. But surface tension also exerts pressure on the trapped gas, which explains why bubbles pop rather than just break.

Courtesy James Bird

After a bubble breaks, the retracting liquid may form a lip that traps a donut of air. This donut is the origin of tiny “daughter bubbles” that can break and form yet another ring of “granddaughter” bubbles.

Using high-speed video, Stone, Bird and their colleagues popped a bubble and watched it break. As the trapped gas rushed out, surface tension retracted the bubble film, and a lip formed around at the top. “If you apply force to something, it tends to move in straight line,” says Stone. “When the soap film pops, surface tension pulls to open the ring, so the film moves in a horizontal line at first.”

Meanwhile, the absence of the internal pressure causes the rest of the bubble to implode. The combination of these two motions creates a tiny lip at the top of the bursting bubble. As the bubble retracts, the lip curls over and briefly traps a donut of air around the bubble.

From that point, says Bird, “It’s 19th century physics. The daughter bubbles form for the same reason that a faucet jet breaks up into little droplets.” Translated: The droplets have a lower energy state than the stream of water, and the daughter bubbles have a lower energy state than the donut of trapped air around the broken bubble.

Chain reaction

The formation of “daughter bubbles” is not the end of the story, however: when they land on the liquid, they may also break up, forming a third generation of bubbles.

When a bubble pops, a jet of material may rise at the center. In a big bubble, these jets remain at the surface, but the higher pressure in a tiny bubble will squirt a smidgeon of liquid, together with any associated chemicals or particles, into the air.

The “bubble-begets-more-bubbles” phenomenon could matter, because these jets can carry pathogens and spread disease in hot tubs or swimming pools.

And a ridiculous number of bubbles — between 10¹⁸ and 10²⁰ — supposedly break every second in the oceans. These bubbles can carry heat, chemicals and water vapor into the atmosphere, affecting weather and climate.

Computerized climate models must consider the interaction between ocean and atmosphere, which entails accounting for all these breaking bubbles, Stone says. “If you don’t know these parameters, your model is filled with ad hoc parameters [AKA wild guesses] and you don’t even know the order of magnitude. Computer models are only as good as the parameters that go into them.”

Small is beautiful

By showing how large bubbles create a cascade of smaller bubbles, the new study highlights the real-world effects of large bubbles, says Bird. “People have discounted bubbles bigger than a few millimeters because they did not create aerosols, but we think the impact is actually much greater because the bigger bubbles are a source of lots of little bubbles, which can make a lot of aerosols.”

And the answer to your inevitable last question is yes. Bird “absolutely” did play with soap bubbles as a kid.

David J. Tenenbaum

Photo: audi_insperation

To young people, bubbles are nearly irresistible!