To be clear, I'll not be talking about champagne, soap, or the late-Hawaiian-singer Don Ho.

Wired's blogger Aaron Rowe wrote about some nifty videos of bubbles swimming through microfluids in this article. Rowe compares the videos to Bubble Bobble and Pac Man, bringing new personality to these physicists' work. The article is just one of several decent pieces of correspondence from the 3^rd International Conference on Bioengineering and Nanotechnology in Singapore.

This article from Science is a bit older (from February), but I really wanted to discuss bubbles, so I dug up the link. The authors build AND/OR gates, timers, flip-flops, modulators, and oscillators using bubbles as "bits." Calculations are performed while the microdroplets flow through etched channels. I did something like this when I was a kid: I spelled out messages with alphabet cereal and passed the bowl to my sister. After satisfying her curiosity as to what I had "written" (which I’m sure was a critical communication), she got to satisfy her hunger. Ok, so that's not exactly how this "bubble logic" works. It seems like the authors use a two-phase liquid, so the phase represents the binary state of a bit. At least, that's what I think happens.

Still, you could transfer matter and information simultaneously on a micrometer-scale. If you encode a message in bubble-bits and send it across a microtubule, and the message is intercepted by a third party, either matter or information will be missing, and the receiver of the message will know the message was intercepted. Creating a well encrypted bubble message. Are the authors dreaming of voting machines that run on bubble logic?

Regardless, if binary information can be gleaned from this combination of "chemistry and computation," I think someone should go ahead and make a bubble bit version of Bubble Bobble.