A 13-year-old girl from Connecticut named Mallory Kievman has come up with a pretty clever cure for hiccups: vinegar lollipops! She developed the idea after researching various at-home remedies—a teaspoon of vinegar, hard candy, etc—as well as the physiological reason for a bout of hiccups.
Mallory explained to the New York Times that the vinegar "triggers a set of nerves in your throat and mouth that are responsible for the hiccup reflex arc." Over-stimulating those nerves cancels out the message to hiccup, problem sovled.
Today, some two years and 100 recipes since she began the project, Mallory is working with a team of MBA students from the University of Connecticut who will help bring Hiccupops to the consumer market—hopefully this summer. Danny Briere, founder of Startup Connecticut, a company which nurtures new companies, met Mallory last year at the Connecticut Innovation Convention, a competition for kids that awarded Mallory awards for both innovation and patentability. Mr. Briere is confident Hiccupops is one of those essential products that could be on the market for decades to come and has taken Mallory on as a client.
Sorry, Mallory's classmates, you're def never winning the school science fair, now. [Business Insider, NYT - Image via MaleWitch/Shutterstock]