Ordinary soap bubbles usually exist for a minute or less before popping due to either a rupture forced by gravity-induced drainage or the evaporation of the liquid from which the bubble is composed. But physicist Aymeric Roux and colleagues discovered ways to mitigate these factors, resulting in bubbles that can last for a year or more. For example, glycerol tends to adhere to water molecules, so a bubble with a shell that contains both water and glycerol is able to draw additional water molecules from the surrounding air and thereby compensate for evaporation.