While vodka and Cheerios doesn’t exactly sound like the breakfast of champions, that unlikely combination did form the basis of real scientific research.
As reported by New Scientist, a recent Harvard University experiment used vodka as a way of exploring the Marangoni effect, which, as the magazine explains it, happens “when a fluid with a lower surface tension rapidly spreads out across the surface of a fluid with higher surface tension.” It is perhaps best illustrated by the way Cheerios will clump together in your bowl of cereal.
In the experiment, researcher Jackson Wilt 3D-printed small pucks equipped with an alcohol-filled fuel tank, which helps move them across water. Wilt explains that they chose alcohol because it has a lower surface tension than water and it evaporates, which allows the water to remain uncontaminated. They picked vodka in particular for its high alcohol content.
“Beer would be quite bad,” Wilt says. “Vodka is probably the best thing you could use. Absinthe… you’d have a lot of propulsion.”
As for why all this is important, Wilt says that the experiment’s findings could have a real-world impact.
“Let’s say you have a body of water where you need to release some chemical, and you want to distribute it more evenly, or you have some chemical process in which you need to deposit the material over time,” Wilt says. “I feel like there’s some really interesting behavior here.”
At the very least, that sounds more useful than getting drunk as part of a well-balanced breakfast.