DIET COKE AND MENTOS

THE SPIRIT OF SCIENCE is alive and thriving, thanks to YouTube. In the fall
of 2005, videos began making the rounds showing what happens when pieces of Men-
tos candy are dropped into bottles of Diet Coke: Each Mentos candy has thousands
of tiny pits over its surface which become “nucleation sites”—perfect places for the
carbon dioxide in the soda to form bubbles. The combination instantly triggers an ex-
plosion of foam (right). The phenomenon itself exploded, as YouTube users reenacted

and improved on the experiment. There were
videos in slow motion, two hundred liters of
soda combined with five hundred Mentos
mints, and a Guinness world record set by
2,865 simultaneous geysers.

IN DECEMBER OF 2009, a twenty-
three-year-old Nigerian man on board a flight
from Amsterdam to Detroit became known as
“the underwear bomber” when he attempted
to detonate explosives hidden inside his
underwear, as parodied by Barry Blitt (left).

BARRY BLITT FIRST TRIED HIS IDEA
with two children and then with two business-
men before finding the right and frightfully
funny combination—two Arab men (opposite).
All versions make fun of terrorism, but only that
one makes fun of our own fears. In all instances,
the co-conspirators look conspicuously guilty and
make sure that the stewardess has safely passed. In
the end, the image did not run out of a concern
that the Diet Coke and Mentos reference may just
have been too obscure for many of our readers.

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