Vividly coloured paintings have been created by researchers in Russia by using a laser to heat the surface of a metal until it begins to evaporate. Developed by Vadim Veiko, Yaroslava Andreeva and colleagues at ITMO University in Saint Petersburg, the technique makes colours by creating oxide layers on the metal surface. The palette of nine basic colours can be created, erased and changed using the laser and the team used the technique to make a 7×5 cm reproduction of Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night in just a few minutes.

The team now hope to incorporate the laser-painting technology into a handheld tool and describe their research in Optica.

Have you ever wondered how many bubbles there are in a glass of beer? Gérard Liger-Belair and  Clara Cilindre did, and now they have an answer. The duo, which had previously counted bubbles in a champagne flute, first measured the carbon dioxide content of a freshly-poured glass of lager at 5 °C. Then they calculated how many bubbles would form at defects in the glass that are more than 1.4 micron wide. High-speed photographs revealed how bubbles grew as they rose in the glass, removing more carbon dioxide from the beer.

Glass imperfections

Putting all of this together, they reckon that between about 200,000 and nearly two million bubbles are created in a gently poured glass of lager before it goes flat. Interestingly, they discovered that beer and champagne bubbles form differently in a glass, with larger imperfections leading to more bubbles in beer but not in champagne. The researchers, based at the University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne, describe their study in ACS Omega.

Austenites have a new way of reading their favourite author now that a passage from Jane Austen’s novel Mansfield Park has been encoded in a series of oligomer molecules. Eric Anslyn and colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin used a new molecular-data-storage technique to encode the quote, “If one scheme of happiness fails, human nature turns to another; if the first calculation is wrong, we make a second better: we find comfort somewhere”.

According to the team, the words of wisdom can be read back without prior knowledge of the structures that encoded the passage. You can read more about the encoding technique in Cell Reports Physical Science.