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FORGET teacups, here’s a storm in a bathtub. Swirling patterns in soap bubbles have been shown to mimic the vast flows in Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, or hurricanes on Earth.

Soap films can be used to model planetary atmospheres because both are effectively two-dimensional. But while pairs of vortices have been seen in flattish soap films confined by walls, analogues of the isolated, swirling storms seen in nature had not.

Now Hamid Kellay and colleagues at the University of Bordeaux in France have observed isolated vortices in a hemispherical bubble whose edge rested in a circular groove (Physical Review Letters, vol 100, p 144501). The lack of walls around the soap film is crucial in allowing isolated vortices to develop, Kellay says.