Kids Create Super-Strong Coffee Cup

Don’t you hate it when your favorite coffee mug breaks? Now you don’t have to worry, provided that you don’t mind using a mug the size of a bowling ball.

A team of New Mexico Tech students recently won second place in the American Ceramic Society’s Mug Drop Contest by creating a mug with a large ceramic weight on the bottom. Not only do you get a great cup of coffee with this mug, but you also get an incredible forearm workout.

For the contest the various mugs are dropped onto a concrete slab and then tested to see if they still hold a cup of coffe. The New Mexico Tech mug’s large ceramic base shattered when it was dropped from a height of nine feet, but the mug portion remained unscathed.

Of course, if you were really clumsy and dropped it again all would be lost. Then you’d be sorry.

The first place mug, created by a team from the University of Missouri-Rolla looks much more like a ceramic thermos than a coffee mug. The University of Missouri-Rolla team concentrated on making the edges rounded and the handle small.

I’m glad there is vital research being done to create unbreakable coffee mugs, but I think they should be spending their time on more important things: like making paper coffee cups that stick to the roof of your car as you drive off.