Activated Charcoal to Prevent Hangover

"Simply take 2-4 pills of charcoal after a night of drinking to prevent a hangover!" 

I ordered a bottle of charcoal for another pinterest project to test out, but when looking things up online I found there are actually many different remedies that call for charcoal. One was to use it to prevent hangovers. Sound enough idea, if it's good enough to use in a hospital for absorbing chemicals, surely it'll work on alcohol too right?

So I decided to take one for the team this past Saturday and test it out. One bottle of wine later, I took 3 charcoal pills and went to bed. Come morning, I was hungover. In fact I was SUPER hungover. Far worse than I would normally be after having a bottle of wine.

So what went wrong? Well research actually shows this isn't a good remedy to prevent a hangover. There's a great write up done on this by Mark Rucker, who wrote about the science behind why this doesn't work. The short of it is that charcoal seems to have ZERO affect on the blood level of alcohol in your system, so it won't really prevent a hangover.

The best way to prevent a hangover is still the old standby of not drinking too much, and making sure you are staying hydrated; try having a glass of water for each alcoholic drink you have.

And if you DO find yourself with a hangover, the best remedy in treating it is hydration, and eggs. Not only is the protein in eggs helpful, they contain a large amount of cysteine, which helps break down the hangover causing toxin called acetaldehyde.

Good Idea Friday - How To Open A Bottle Of Wine With A Shoe

"Open a Bottle of Wine with Your Shoe Maybe the most useful thing anyone needs to know, ever."

This is a trick I found on pinterest a while back that I was really excited to try. I watched the original video posted, and it looked easy. But if it's so easy why isn't this a common party trick? So I decided to test it out myself and film the results: 

I decided to skip the idea of hitting it on a wall because A: I didn't want to damage my walls and B: I figured this is best used when away from home and without a corkscrew handy, so chances are you won't have a wall to hit. Despite hitting it on various things, my husband was unable to get the cork to even budge slightly.  However once it was opened, and recorked, we tried again with far easier success.

I've since watched a couple more videos on youtube of people trying this, and it seems those who did succeed were hitting the bottle for quite some time before it started to budge. So I'm going to go ahead and say this will work, but it would be easier all around if you opened the bottle, recorked it, and then did the tree/wall method like we showed. 

So has anyone tried this yet? What were your results? Do you have any other tricks and tips to opening a bottle without a corkscrew? 

Baking Soda and Vinegar Instead of Helium to Inflate Balloons

"No helium needed to fill balloons for parties.....just vinegar and baking soda!"

This is a pin that if anyone took middle school science class, they shouldn't be pinning. Why? Because you can't just make up helium. Can you use baking soda and vinegar to fill balloons? Sure. But it's not going to float like helium will. You're better off just blowing them up with your own breath, unless you are planning on using it as a science experiment for kids. Which, come to find out, is what the image is actually depicting. 

A quick search and I found the source of the image. Over at the blog Mom to 2 Posh Lil Divas, she writes about a common trick of using vinegar and baking soda to fill a balloon, showing off the gas the chemical reaction produces. In fact, she has even added a disclaimer on the post explaining that this will not produce helium. Helium is a naturally occurring gas, you can't just make it. It's number 2 on the periodic table of elements, meaning it's lighter than air (which is primarily made up of heavier oxygen and nitrogen), which is why when you fill a balloon with helium, it floats instead of sinking like if it were filled with air. (The only reason an air balloon sinks in the first place is because you're loading it up with compressed molecules, making it heavier than the air around it.) The gas produced from baking soda and vinegar, however, is your run of the mill carbon dioxide. Since carbon dioxide is heavier than air, it won't float. In fact, technically it will be heavier than if you simply filled it normally with air.

So there you have it, this is a great experiment for the kids, but don't think this is going to magically replace helium in balloons.