On the very slim chance that you’ve never done so, it’s a match-three puzzle game where you fire bubbles from a cannon at the bottom of the screen towards a descending stack of bubbles. Puzzle Bobble Everybubble! is the latest Puzzle Bobble title from Taito, and like its predecessors, it’s a great game – if a slightly over-familiar one for anyone who’s played a previous entry in the series. That hasn’t stopped Taito over the years, with 18 official sequels or spinoff Puzzle Bobble titles by my count under its belt, and so many clones and rip-offs that they’re not even worth counting. Related reading: Another puzzle game from a vintage series (or, in this case, two series’) that’s worth checking out is Puyo Puyo Tetris. Isn’t it nice when games developers polish an idea until it’s just about perfect from the first attempt? It certainly is, but it creates a huge problem for any subsequent sequels. Fire up a copy of OG Puzzle Bobble (or Bust-A-Move, depending on where on the planet you live) and it’s absolutely just as playable today as it was back then. I use that tense specifically because it’s one of those concepts where the developers got it absolutely plumb right from the get-go, all the way back in 1996. Mark Sincell is a freelance science writer based in Houston, TX.Puzzle Bobble is an amazing puzzle game. The new experiment will directly measure the internal temperature of the bubble by tracking the thermal motion of electrons. Putterman is already designing an experiment to find out for sure. “I think we will have to goose the bubbles to get fusion,” he says. But Crum doubts that these bubbles are hot enough to fuse hydrogen. “This is really nice work,” says Larry Crum of the University of Washington in Seattle. Although it is not clear how this will change temperature estimates, says Putterman, none of the subsonic collapse theories can possibly be correct. Contrary to the assumptions of current theories of sonoluminescence, both teams confirmed earlier lower resolution experiments indicating that the supersonic collapse of the bubble walls launches a shock wave at four times the speed of sound. A faint flash of ultraviolet light from the crushed bubble accompanies the outgoing shock wave–a process called sonoluminescence–and the researchers used the flash to trigger the camera, which blinks once every 400 picoseconds and produces a time-lapse photo of the expanding shock wave. Now, groups led by Putterman and by Rainer Pecha of the University of Stuttgart in Germany have turned the eye of a streak camera on individual bubbles levitated in water by a standing sound wave oscillating at 20 kHz. The collapse happens in about 100 picoseconds, much too fast for most high-speed cameras. But these temperature estimates depend upon theories that are not well tested. Some physicists have even suggested that the bubble temperature could reach the 15 million degrees needed for hydrogen atoms in the gas to fuse together by the same process that powers the sun. Using current theories, researchers have set a lower limit of about 25,000 degrees Kelvin for the internal temperature of the completely collapsed bubble, although Putterman says it could be much higher. The gas in the collapsing bubble can become extraordinarily hot. “Inside the expanding bubble you have a near vacuum,” explains Seth Putterman of the University of California in Los Angeles, “and the positive outside pressure crushes the bubble.” This arrangement is catastrophically unstable. Contrary to their usual behavior, the bubbles begin to collapse when the water pressure is small and expand when the pressure is high. If the vibrations are violent enough, the viscous bubbles can’t keep up with the rapidly changing wave pressure. Reported in the 7 February PRL and the February issue of Physical Review E, the new images confirm previous doubts about theoretical estimates of the bubble temperature and move physicists one step closer to answering a long-standing question: Can nuclear fusion occur in a water bubble?Īs sound waves ripple through water, the accompanying pressure oscillations stretch and compress gas bubbles. Now, physicists have taken the highest resolution photographs ever made of the destructive shock wave leaving the surface of a collapsing bubble. The process is called cavitation, and today the same scrubbing bubbles are used for everything from cleaning semiconductors to carving the fat out of a human body. Lord Rayleigh discovered in 1917 that sound waves from a ship’s propeller can cause tiny gas bubbles in the water to explode and erode the propeller. Images of the shock waves from a single bubble contradict current theories of the bubble explosion process. A liposuction probe uses cavitation by millions of exploding bubbles (blue luminescence above) to damage fat cells in the body.
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