If you cannot enjoy your morning coffee leisurely in a seated position, you may want to consider switching to lattes to avoid spillage.

According to the Los Angeles Times, authors of a study published in the journal Physics of Fluids said the thin layer of foam on lattes prevent them from spilling over a cup's rim or through the sipping hole in a travel cup. However, the study may also have an impact on the transportation of oil and gas.

"While I was studying for my Ph.D. 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," study lead author Alban Sauret, who is currently a researcher at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), said in a press release. "The potential applications are much bigger than just beer."

Emilie Dressaire, a mechanical engineer at New York University Polytechnic School of Engineering who co-authored the study, said a drive-through attendant first sparked her interest in the matter. She said the attendant handed her the latte she ordered and the stopper she asked for to keep from spilling on herself. But in his experience, customers must not have complained much about spilling their latte.

"That got me thinking, 'Well, what does he mean by that?'" she told the Times. "And then I realized what he meant was the foam of the latte was going to prevent spillage while I was driving around."

If their work can be applied to gas and oil transportation, they could make the practice safer.

"When you think about your cup of coffee, you can see that the motion can get pretty violent," Dressaire said. "Imagine the same thing but at a much larger scale... you're going to generate forces against the walls of the container that are going to be really high every time the ship hits a wave. So the motion of the liquid inside the ship can lead to structural damage and it can also can disturb the motion of the ship itself."