Magic Inc.

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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]

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p>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]

28 thoughts on “Magic Inc.”

  1. Cool.

    And, I love chemists! What? I used to be one in college…..

    Seriously. I think I’m a little bit in love.

  2. I can’t wait to buy these bubbles! Finally a desi using their intelligence to create something fun. Not saying that desis are useless but it’s cool to know a PhD in chemistry can be used like this.

  4. Ohmigod, where do I buy some? I’d never even heard of colored bubbles before, period, and would have been happy just to get those. But colored bubbles that that don’t stain?! Sweet!!! It’s like a safe version of Holi.

    Two of my best friends had bubbles at their wedding (instead of rice, doves, butterflies, etc)–this would be perfect for an Indian wedding.

  5. I feel like that stupid cereal commercial. the one where the kid in me says: “ohhhh…iwant. iwant. iwant..”

    and the adult in me says: “trace chemicals are sure to remain. whatever happened to good old soapy water? carcinogens everywhere! Has anyone run a toxicity tests to make sure this is safe? what – i’m supposed to believe the FDA?!?

  10. I guess no matter how old and tired and busy we are, we’re all really still a bunch of kids who go “ooh! Ooh!” over the colors 🙂 What a great thought to start Friday with. (as I shove 8 year olds for prime seating at Hari Puttar, heh)

  12. Awesome stuff! I can see myself having a blast with these…excuse the pun. I agree with NN…it is refreshing to see that an educated desi is using his brains to make something so fun!Way to go! Perfect article to start the weekend..

  18. Among the ideas Kehoe has already mocked up are a finger paint that fades from every surface except a special paper

    You can already see the Crayola Ads on TV.

    Cica says:

    Has anyone run a toxicity tests to make sure this is safe? what – i’m supposed to believe the FDA?!?

    The EU yesterday passed an impressive resolution that requires about 10,000 or so chemicals to be tested for health safety etc. Its a good start! And even though its a EU resolution, it will have ramifications in the US.

  20. Here’s where Dr. Sabnis earned his PhD. http://www.udct.org. It’s a fine school and turns out some very smart people. Some think that dyes and dyestuff was low/old tech. But these folks are now into polymer doping, photonic materials and all that.

  23. Uh, I can’t tell if you think the EU regulations are a good thing or not…..requiring all sorts of testing doesn’t necessarily make people safer, can stifle creativity and can hold up all sorts of drugs and chemical that can be useful. The trick to regulations and tests is how they are done, not simply that they are done.

    *Remember, this is the EU that has developing African nations so spooked by GM foods that they are not planting crops that could be potentially quite successful.

  27. Why does every succesfull indian guy have a mustache?
    They hand them out during orientation at IIT. Shh… don’t tell anyone.

    Freshman(1st yr) are pressured/forced by seniors not to have a mustache in most indian colleges. All part of raging/hazing culture in indian schools. Once you’r an upper classman then you’re ‘allowed’ to grow a mustache.

    Tunku the great had a funny article in wsj its reproduced here

    Whisker wise Women seldom make passes at men with mustaches. Dorothy Parker didnÂ’t say that, my wife did—or wounding words to that effect—when we met for the very first time. I had a mustache then, a fine, manly specimen, which I twirled up at the ends for extra effect. By our third meeting, it was gone. In sum, I gained a lovely wife but surrendered forever my right to a mustache. On balance, I would say that the contract has been an agreeable one. That doesnÂ’t stop me from cultivating a sturdy nostalgia for my mustache, or from looking back occasionally—and wistfully—on the days when I was free to grow one. These feelings came to the surface some days ago when my brother, who lives in Delhi, sent me an urgent request for his favorite brand of mustache wax, which he believed I could buy in New York. HeÂ’s running dangerously low on supplies bought last year in Europe and does not want to have to resort to Fix-O, the local Indian brand. Fix-O is a gooey, green substance that causes a slight encrustation of the mustache, so I understand his panic. He may, I fear, have to make do with Fix-O for an uncomfortable while. My inquiries in New York—at several barbers’—proved fruitless. Determined to find some decent wax, I resorted next to the Internet. Typing the word “moustache” (as I was taught to spell it) did not help, as I was flooded with results that were mainly for homosexuals. (“Beards and Moustaches by Gayscape”, “Moustache: Relax Club for Gays” and so forth.) “Mustache,” spelled the American way, proved marginally less lurid. I did, eventually, find “SkippyÂ’s Mustasjevoks” (at http://www.skippys.no), a Norwegian company run by a man called Ole Skibnes. (HereÂ’s what he says about himself: “IÂ’m a resident of the city of Trondheim, Norway. IÂ’m married and have three lovely daughters. In addition to my passionate work with this firm and other mustache related activities I work as a policeman in Trondheim police department.”) I have asked Mr. Skibnes if he can ship his wax to India, and await his response. I think my brotherÂ’s problem is nearer resolution. Cosmopolitan AmericaÂ’s disregard for the mustache can be gauged from the fact that the last president to sport any sort of facial hair was William Howard Taft. One can also be sure that if either Al Gore or George W. Bush chose to grow a mustache this month, neither would make it to the house where Taft once lived. This popular abhorrence could be the result of a medley of factors: an obsession with hygiene, for one, crossed with a certain Protestant ethic, by which self-betterment is associated with a “clean look”. Besides, men no longer need the mustache as a virility symbol. In the old days—of the Civil War, of Crimea, of KiplingÂ’s subalterns on the Afghan frontier—a hirsute swarthiness was part of virility, of a warrior code. But as war-making has become more efficient, men no longer need to look fierce, or even manly. The cult of the mustache persists only in ultra-patriarchal societies, like India or Turkey. This, simply put, is a case of “me man, hairy, dominant/you woman, hairless, submissive.” In our cities, as male dominance abates, few men are hirsute. Those with beards are preponderantly college professors and orthodox Jews or Muslims. Mustaches still offer a complex anthropology. As my Internet encounter confirmed, the mustache has enjoyed a certain status as a gay “signifier” in the West. But a homosexual academic I questioned told me that the mustache has now “receded as a gay accoutrement, just as gays themselves have begun to recede from view, losing their distinctive tribal marks as societyÂ’s tolerance increases.” In urban America, mustachioed men are now more likely to be blue-collar—cops, firemen, construction workers—or people from a non-American culture, where facial hair is not disdained. In parts of rural India, the act of twirling your mustache in the presence of a woman is enough to suggest that you desire her. This, not surprisingly, could lead to violence, especially if the woman has a male relative present to take umbrage… From “Manly Men Keep a Stiff Upper Lip, and a Bare One” by Tunku Varadarajan in the The Wall Street Journal.

  28. cicatrix said:

    “trace chemicals are sure to remain. whatever happened to good old soapy water? carcinogens everywhere! Has anyone run a toxicity tests to make sure this is safe? what – i’m supposed to believe the FDA?!?”

    I’m glad I’m not the only one who had this reaction. Stupid repercussions…always screwing around with fun stuff. BUt I did find this. Methinks it’s safe, especially since it’s mixed with soapy water. If you were to drink a bunch, though, who knows?

    Maybe your kids would have black hair if you rubbed their heads one way…