August 2012: Tudur presented soap bubble experiments with wire frames and shortest networks at the National Eisteddfod of Wales in the Vale of Glamorgan.

July 2012: David Ferguson won a poster prize for his work on Foams in Porous Media at the 9th EuFoam conference in Lisbon, Portugal. Adil, Tudur and Simon all gave short presentations.

June 2012: Kirsten Williams, Aberystwyth MMath student, has started a Walter Idris Jones summer research scholarship. She will work on the optimal geometry of clusters of cells.

June 2012: Frank Morgan wrote about our recent preprint on the geometry of soap bubble clusters on his Huffington post blog.

June 2012: Simon gave a seminar at the Institut Navier in Paris, on "Modelling the structure and rheology of foams". He also discussed rheology and drainage of foams with colleagues there and at other Parisian universities.

May 2012: Simon co-organised the Wales Mathematics Colloquium 2012 at Gregynog Hall.

May 2012: Adil will organise, with Stefan Hutzler, a workshop on packing problems in Dublin in September.

April 2012: Simon and Tudur attended a RIVIC event in Cardiff. Tudur presented his work on the Stokes problem in foams as part of the graduate school in visual computing.

March 2012: Simon attended and co-organised, with Frank Morgan and John Sullivan, a succesful workshop at the ICMS in Edinburgh on Isoperimetric problems, space-filling, and soap bubble geometry.

Feb/March 2012: Paul Grassia (Manchester) came for an extended visit to Aberystwyth to work on problems in oil recovery, funded by the Hydrofrac FP7 grant. Bill Rossen (Delft) joined us briefly, and gave an institute seminar on "Foam Generation for Improved Sweep Efficiency in Enhanced Oil Recovery".

January 2012: Simon attended and co-organised a succesful CECAM workshop at TCD on the Dissipative Rheology of Foams. He is slowly compiling contributions from speakers.

December 2011: Tudur spoke at the Midwinter meeting of the British Society of Rheology, held at UCL. Ex-group member Sian Jones was also there, talking about her French foam experiments.

November 2011: We hosted a visit from Andy Kraynik, formerly of Sandia and Manchester University, under the Distinguished Visiting Fellowship Scheme of the Royal Academy of Engineering. This was a joint application with Stephen Neethling at Imperial College London, where Andy also spent a fortnight. We worked together on developing robust algorithms for exploring the structure and rheology of wet foams.

November 2011: Benjamin Dollet and Sian Jones visited from the Institute de Physique de Rennes under our jointly-funded Alliance British Council grant. We made progress in comparing simulations, experiments and theory of flowing foams.

October 2011: Foams as art ... here are the bubble pictures from the foyer of the Physical Sciences Building, taken in our experimental laboratory:

Please acknowledge foams@aber if you use them.

October 2011: A preliminary programme is now available for our CECAM workshop on the Dissipative Rheology of Foams in Dublin next January.

October 2011: Together with Frank Morgan and John Sullivan, Simon will organise a workshop at the International Centre for Mathematical Sciences on Isoperimetric problems, space-filling, and soap bubble geometry, to be held in March 2012.

August 2011: Bob Laramee and Dan Lipsa, from Swansea University's department of Computer Science visited. We discussed the visualisation of data from our foam simulations, in work funded by RIVIC.

June 2011: Andrew Kraynik visited from the University of Manchester to work with Simon on simulating the dynamics of wet foams.

June 2011: Simon and Tudur visited the Institute de Physique de Rennes to work with colleagues there under our jointly-funded Alliance British Council grant. Tudur presented his work on spheres in foams at the foams group meeting.

May 2011: The University of Texas at Austin hosted an IUTAM Symposium on the Mechanics of Liquid and Solid Foams. Simon was a member of the scientific committee, and presented our work on Elasto-Plastic Flows of Foams.

May 2011: Sian's PDRA position has now come to an end, and she has moved to Rennes to work on foam flow in porous media at the Institute de Physique de Rennes.

April 2011: Simon spoke at the University of Wales Institute of Non-Newtonian Mechanics spring rheology meeting at Portmeirion in North Wales.

April 2011: Simon attended a workshop organised jointly by the Isaac Newton Institute and WIMCS at Swansea University on Computational Challenges in PDEs. He spoke about bubble-scale models of foam rheology.

January/February 2011: Simon visited Profs. Fatima Vaz and Paulo Teixeira in Lisbon, Portugal, and hosted their reciprocal visits to Aberystwyth, funded under the Treaty of Windsor exchange programme. We are working together to analyse the results of experiments and simulations on the uniaxial, cyclic extension of two-dimensional foams.

January 2011: CECAM will fund a workshop on the Dissipative Rheology of Foams, organised by Simon, Stefan Hutzler (Dublin), Isabelle Cantat (Rennes) and Reinhard Hohler (Paris). It will be held in Dublin next year, January 9-12, 2012.

January 2011: Simon and Adil hosted visitors from Trinity College Dublin: Prof. Denis Weaire came to discuss sphere packings, while Mike Sexton captured experimental and simulated data on the statistics of foam structure and flow.

December 2010: Simon gave a lecture to both the Lancashire and North-west Branch of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications and the Lancashire and Cumbria Branch of the Institute of Physics, hosted by the University of Central Lancashire. Some of the slides are available .

November/December 2010: We hosted the return visits of Dr Benjamin Dollet and Dr Jerome Lambert from the Institute de Physique de Rennes, under our jointly-funded Alliance British Council grant.

October 2010: Tudur and Simon gave presentations on simulations of foam rheology at the Society of Rheology Annual Meeting in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

September 2010: Simon gave a keynote presentation, "Predicting the response of aqueous foams" in a mini-symposium on Emerging Methodologies in Materials Characterization at the 7th international conference on the Mechanics of Time-Dependent Materials in Portoroz, Slovenia.

August/September 2010: Katie Cavanagh has joined us for a summer project, using the high-speed camera to look at knot breaking and sedimentation in ordered foams.

July 2010: Simon presented our work on minimal perimeter problems at Computers in Scientific Discovery 5, held in Sheffield, UK.

July 2010: EuFoam 2010, probably the biggest foam meeting in the world, was held in Borovets, Bulgaria. Simon gave a talk on topological changes in foam rheology. He and Sian also presented posters, the latter reporting on our work with Procter and Gamble.

May/June 2010: Simon and Sian visited colleagues at the Institute de Physique de Rennes, France, thanks to a British Council grant to jointly investigate contraction flows of foams. Simon gave a talk on "How foams flow".

May 2010: Tudur Davies, who completed his PhD in the group last year, has now returned as a PDRA, working on the project "Modelling and visualization of complex materials", as part of The Research Institute of Visual Computing (RIVIC).

March 2010: Simon travelled to the spectacular location of Banff in Canada for a workshop on Volume Inequalities at the Banff International Research Station for Mathematical Innovation and Discovery (BIRS). He talked about recent work with Edwin Flikkema on the minimal perimeter of confined bubbles.

March 2010: Defects in foams mimic defects in solids: Simon's paper with colleagues in Lisbon is featured in the research highlights of the Journal of Physics: Condensed Matter.

December 2009: Simon attended the BSR midwinter meeting at Edinburgh University, and gave a talk on the Rheology of Dry Foams.

September 2009: Doris Stingl (Regensburg) has started a one-semester research project on "The effect of non-uniform container shape on foam drainage".

August 2009: Simon was a co-organiser of "Flow of foams", a workshop held at the Lorentz Centre in the Netherlands, 17-21 August 2009.

August 2009: We advertised for a postdoctoral research associate in Modelling and visualization of complex materials.

July 2009: Our three summer students have now finished their various projects. Francois Boulogne (Physics, Paris) showed how a negative lift arises when foams flow past a fixed, asymmetric, obstacle. It is of course the asymmetry that is important, but Francois was able to quantify this in terms of the curvature of the sides of the obstacle. Sam Spencer (2nd year Maths and Physics) performed drainage and stability experiments on foams, to determine the influence of container dimensions and surfactant concentration on foam lifetime. He showed that the effect of evaporation, even on short time-scales, is much larger than we believed. David Ferguson (2nd year MMath) held a Walter Idris summer bursary to investigate minimal perimeter partitions of triangles. In contrast to previous work, he considered arbitrary triangles, and delineated the topologies of the optimal partitions based on the shape of the triangle.

June 2009: Two A-level students, Jessica Mowatt and Jacob Hebditch, visited the group as part of their work experience: "The time we have spent in Aberystwyth University has been an insightful period into the electrifying world of Physics. Our days consisted of high speed photography of rebounding balls, bursting balloons and more, including the mechanisms of a bumble bee's wings (see videos)! We also used a rheometer to measure various properties of different complex liquids (e.g. mayonnaise, toothpaste), such as viscosity, shear strength and elasticity. The week ended with a tour of the various facilities of the department, which proved an exciting and inspiring event. Overall, the experience has been beneficial in understanding what occurs behind closed laboratory doors and has, in no doubt, increased our interest in pursuing a stimulating and enticing career in research."

April 2009: Simon gave a talk at the British Applied Mathematics Colloquium at the beginning of April in Nottingham on Predicting the shape of bubbles moving through narrow channels. This is joint work with Gennady Mishuris and Denis Weaire (Dublin) which will soon be published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society.

April 2009: The whole group went to Cardiff for the 5th Annual European Rheology Conference. Aled and Tudur presented posters, while Simon co-organised and spoke at a symposium on Interfacial Phenomena, Surfactants and Foams.

April 2009: Simon has been invited to join the council of the British Society of Rheology, and attended his first council meeting in Cardiff.

April 2009: There is a new face in the group: Francois Boulogne is visiting from Paris for three months. He will extend our simulation work on foam flow past obstacles to explore obstacle shapes that are expected to display the phenomenon of negative lift (due to the elasticity of the foam and the asymmetry of the obstacle).

March 2009: Simon travelled to Oslo to give a two-day short course on the Rheology and Structure of High Interface Fluid Systems, with G.G. Fuller (Stanford) and J. Vermant (KU Leuven).

January 2009: Simon travelled to Lisbon at the invitation of Prof. Paulo Teixeira of the Centro de Fisica Teorica e Computacional, Universidade de Lisboa, to give a lecture on "Foams: form and flow". He also pursued collaborative work with Paulo and Prof. M.F. Vaz of Instituto Superior Tecnico, Lisboa. Indeed, while visiting we received the proofs of a joint article on the "Effect of the number of shells on the pressure and energy of two-dimensional free bubble clusters", to appear in Colloids and Surfaces A. We are now introducing controlled topological disorder and investigating its effect in the limit in which the number of bubbles goes to infinity.

October 2008: Simon visited Cape Town, South Africa, to give a plenary at the 2nd Southern African Conference on Rheology. He talked about "Foam rheology in confined geometries: bubble-scale modelling".

September 2008: The foams group hosted a visit by several notable aphrologists, including Weaire (Dublin), Marmottant (Grenoble) and Dollet (Rennes), for informal multi-lateral discussions on numerous projects of mutual interest. These included rheological modelling in the high-velocity limit, higher harmonics in rheometry and experimental investigations of flowing foams.

September 2008: Dr Sian Jones will join the group in September as a PDRA to work on a Procter and Gamble/EPSRC-funded project to investigate the foamability and rheological characteristics of new surfactant mixtures.

September 2008: Congratulations to Tudur for his success in the R M Davies Research Prize competition.

August 2008: Simon gave a Condensed Matter Research Seminar at the University of California at Irvine. Following this, Simon, Aled and Tudur visited Monterey for the XVth International Congress on Rheology, where Simon gave a lecture and everybody else presented posters. Aled Wyn also won an SOR Travel Grant to attend the meeting. Other highlights included the premiere of the INNFM film on "Yield Stress" and two black-footed albatrosses.

July 2008: Simon has been invited to be a specialist advisor for RAE2008 in the area of foam rheology.

July 2008: Simon, Aled and Tudur travelled to the Netherlands for the ninth EuFoam conference, the largest foam meeting in the world. More than one hundred "aphrologists" attended, from both academia and industry. The meeting was hosted by the European Space Agency at ESTEC in the Netherlands. ESA's interest in foams stems from the possibility to generate homogenous aqueous and metallic foams with the use of microgravity research facilities - during processing on earth the liquid in a foam drains out under gravity, leading to a inhomogeneous structure with consequently inhomogeneous properties. Simon gave an invited talk on "Predicting the Bubble-scale Structure and Rheology of Aqueous Foams", while Tudur and Aled presented posters on their PhD work.

May 2008: Tudur Davies has won a Faculty of Science Postgraduate Prize. This will enable him to present a poster on his work on particle sedimentation in foams at this year's EUFoam conference. The conference will be held at ESTEC in the Netherlands at the beginning of July.