McDonald's re-engineered super-straw is not an early April Fools joke
Did you hear about McDonald's new Chocolate Shamrock Shake? It's a dual-layer shake -- basically a chocolate shake below a regular Shamrock Shake.
But you can't drink it properly with a regular straw. No sir, a regular straw just wouldn't do here, so McDonald's hired some aerospace and robotic engineers to redesign the straw to deliver the ideal 50/50 ratio of flavors while drinking the Chocolate Shamrock Shake.
The result is called STRAW -- Suction Tube for Reverse Axial Withdrawal -- and it looks like a regular straw with a couple of holes at the curvy bottom, but McDonald's, who hired two companies to work on the straw, Jace and NK Labs, claims it's much more than that.
"From a physics perspective, it's actually quite difficult to deliver a proportional amount of both chocolate and mint flavors with each sip. But that's exactly what we did. It's a marvel of fluid dynamics," Seth Newburg, principal engineer and managing partner at NK Labs, said in a statement.
The entire thing looks exactly like an April Fools' joke -- in fact, a Jony Ive-channeling McDonald's presenter (see video above) calls the STRAW "spectacularly unnecessary." However, April 1 is still far away, and McDonald's claims it actually produced 2,000 of these straws, so they probably aren't kidding. The STRAW will be available with the purchase of a Chocolate Shamrock Shake in select restaurants in the U.S.; check out the full list here.
Stan is a Senior Editor at Mashable, where he has worked since 2007. He's got more battery-powered gadgets and band t-shirts than you. He writes about the next groundbreaking thing. Typically, this is a phone, a coin, or a car. His ultimate goal is to know something about everything.
