As a statistical physicist, the title of this article looks the way "Two new papers explore the complexity of neural networks" might to a working ML researcher. Bubbles and foams are, and have been, a topic of intense research in soft matter physics for decades. Foams, in particular, have myriad uses in industry and have many well-established models.
So, as a scientist working in fluid mechanics, I certainly find these two papers interesting. But the interesting bits are highly technical. There doesn't seem to be either a common link between the two papers, nor a good reason why these specific ones are reported on by Ars. The only thing they seem to have in common, is that they were both posted to EurekAlert (which is a place where universities can post press releases) at about the same time. These press releases seem to be the basis for the Ars article, but unfortunately the Ars piece is full of pretty basic mistakes...
TL;DR: if you like bubbles and foams, go read the actual articles, please don't read the Ars piece.
That's basically all news reporting. Imagine all news is about as bad as this article and you'll suddenly realize how misinformed you are on just about everything.
This documentary contains rudimentary information and applications about bubbles - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-Ub_r_GFZY
The same host had one on the same topic from the BBC I can't find, it was also great. BBC docs are very often very well done. Never overproduced or reliant on useless special effects.
Actually, I bet the invention of digital video cameras and computer post-processing makes the whole enterprise much easier. Because my most vivid memory of that time is a debate between my friends about if one had formed or not.
Being able to go back and look at a video that had been slowed down and zoomed in would probably help enormously.
