IF YOU’VE EVER poured a bottle of wine you’ve likely experienced the dreaded bottle drip: wine (almost always red) dripping from the bottle neck onto a tablecloth as you pour it. Leave it to a scientist to come up with a solution! Daniel Perlman, a researcher at Brandeis University in Waltham who works on molecular biophysics, says he’s solved the problem by adding a simple indention right below the lip. It may seem like a no-brainer but Perlman – an inventor with over 1OO patents – spent three years studying slow-motion videos of wine being poured to come up with the idea. He realized the problem was that wine bottles are made of glass (a surface that attracts water), so the liquid curls back around the lip when it’s being poured. He cut a narrow notch below the bottle’s lip that a wine stream is unable to “jump” across – it needs a flatter pathway. Instead of cascading down the bottle’s side and onto someone’s lap, it just hits Perlman’s millimeter-deep groove instead. Gravity pulls it neatly into the glass with the rest of the wine. He’s reportedly talking with manufacturers about incorporating the tweak into bottle designs.