Silent Drinking Straw Science Could End Slurping Forever

Aside from incessant car alarms, there are few noises in the world as rude and annoying as someone slurping the last drops out of their beverage with a drinking straw, but that irksome slurp could be on the way out, as one Japanese student is working on a "silence straw" that would eliminate loud straws forever.

According to Rocket News 24, 18-year-old Kotaro Takahashi is a finalist at Kyoto University's annual Student Projects for the Enhancement of Creativity (SPEC) program with a project to redesign the common drinking straw to eliminate that annoying slurping noise. He's reportedly tried several prototypes with different interior surfaces that already dramatically reduce the sound of slurping.

Takahashi's project does require more work, however, as it apparently does not yet have perfect results if the drinker just sucks really hard. He's hoping to receive a grant of up to $4,400 from SPEC donoations to get more sophisticated sound-detecting equipment and cameras to help him engineer an even quieter straw in the future. Once he perfects his noiseless straw design, he hopes to send it out worldwide so nobody will ever have to listen to that annoying slurp ever again, and maybe someday there could even be an Ig Nobel Prize in it for him.