The type of coffee you are most likely to spill

You are more likely to spill an Americano than you are a latte, according to some important new science.

That's right. Researchers from France and the US have discovered that adding just a little bit of foam could be the answer for any bleary-eyed caffeine addict prone to spilling their morning pick-me-up.

The research, published in the Physics of Fluids journal, was initially conceived when one of the academics, Emilie Dressaire, picked up a particularly foamy latte at Starbucks and realised she didn't really need a lid to stop it spilling.

She reported her breakthrough moment to colleagues at Princeton University and they said they had noticed a similar phenomenon with another foamy liquid - beer.

While I was studying for my PhD in the south of France, we were in a pub, and we noticed that when we were carrying a pint of Guinness, which is a very foamy beer, the sloshing almost didn't happen at all.

• Alban Sauret, researcher

The team developed their findings in the laboratory by using washing up liquid and a regulated flow of air to create uniform layers of 3-millimetre-diameter bubbles.

They then used two different types of sloshing motion on containers with differing levels of foam to test how much the spillability (a word we just made up) of each liquid had been affected.

Their research showed that just five layers of bubbles could decrease the waves by a factor of ten but any more than that had little extra difference. They believe the foam dissipates the energy of the sloshing liquid due to increased friction with the sides of the container.

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