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There’s a lot of green activity happening in this Coca-Cola billboard in the Philippines. The cola giant partnered with the World Wide Fund for Nature to create a 60×60 ft. billboard made of 3,600 Fukien tea plants, a breed excellent at absorbing air pollutants. The pots the tea plants sit in are made of recycled Coca-Cola bottles, the potting mix within is made of industrial by-products and organic fertilizers, and a drip irrigation system was installed to properly hydrate the plants.
I guess I can feel a little bit better about my caffeine habit now.
When you drop Mentos into a plastic Coke container, you might have a rocket. Or it might not work at all. Or it might surprise you! -via I Am Bored
This might make a massive traffic jam a little more tolerable. As part of their “Spread Happiness” mantra, Coke put up a big screen in Bogotá, Colombia, so stranded people could at least be entertained by a movie while they waited for the jam to clear up. Cars not in seeing or hearing distance of the screen could tune in to a local radio station to listen, similar to the way drive-in movies work now. But that’s not all – Coke also hired models to act as carhops, delivering free mini-Cokes (a new product – see, there’s the marketing tie-in) and movie theater fare such as hot dogs, nachos, candy and popcorn.
by Alice Shirrell Kaswell, Improbable Research staff
The nagging question “Which is better, Coca-Cola or Pepsi-Cola?” sprang from an earlier, more basic question: “Can anyone tell the difference?”
Professor Nicholas H. Pronko and colleagues at the University of Wichita, Kansas, conducted a series of experiments in the 1940s and 1950s. They wrote five studies that brought rigor, sophistication, and cachet to the testing of Coke/Pepsi taste- discrimination.
Pronko’s final Coke/Pepsi paper appeared in 1958. In the ensuing half- century, other investigators have digested and challenged his methods and findings.
Advances in technology led, many years later, to investigation of the brain activity of
Coke and Pepsi drinkers. Here is a look back at the early work, the foundation upon which rests so much later planning, effort, and thoughtfully sipped cola.
This history is in some ways emblematic of experimental psychology as a whole—of its maturation and growth as an academic discipline.
Vess Cola, an obscure competitor to both Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola, was included in Pronko’s first “taste this and tell us what kind of cola it is” experiment. The test subjects could not reliably distinguish its taste from those of Coke, Pepsi or Royal Crown Cola.
Enter Pronko
Pronko’s first study asked not just one, but a series of complex, interrelated questions. Volunteer drinkers, some of them habitual cola drink drinkers, some of them not, tasted samples of four different kinds of cola: Coca-Cola, Pepsi-Cola, Royal Crown Cola (a brand that at the time was, like Coke and Pepsi, widely popular), and Vess Cola. Vess Cola was then (and remained) little known.
“Identification of Cola Beverages. I. First Study,” N.H. Pronko and J.W. Bowles, Jr.,
Journal of Applied Psychology, vol. 32, no. 3, June 1948, 304–12.
108 college students tasted and named four different brands of Cola beverages…. From one third to over two thirds of the responses were incorrect on the basis of the subjects’ likes and dislikes. It is concluded that the identification response of Cola beverages is not a function of the physico-chemical properties of the stimulus objects, but a matter of using an available tag or label for it based largely on familiarity.
Pronko and collaborator J.W. Bowles drew several conclusions. One—the most enduring—was that people cannot reliably identify the taste of Coke from that of Pepsi. A billboard advertising Pepsi-Cola.
Pronko Two
The second study came out a mere six months after the first. Spurred and stimulated by criticism—mostly about the way they had labeled the cola glasses (the labels were W, X, Y and Z)—Pronko and Bowles simplified the experiment. This time there were three, rather than four different cola drinks, and the glasses were labeled X, Y and Z:
“Identification of Cola Beverages: II. A Further Study,” N.H. Pronko and J.W. Bowles, Jr., Journal of Applied Psychology, vol. 32, no. 5, October 1948, 559–64.
156 students in elementary psychology served as subjects in a taste experiment with three colas. When presented in random order and also when only one cola was given for an entire series, the results are comparable to a chance distribution and support the hypothesis that the pattern of naming responses was a function of the subjects’ familiarity with cola brand names.
Pronko, Without Coke or Pepsi
Pronko and Bowles then embarked on their third set of experiments. They began by reminding themselves that “when subjects were asked to identify the three leading brands of Cola, they might just as well have drawn their names out of a hat.” So this time, Pronko and Bowles used only obscure brands of cola.
Sipping three kinds of cola that they had probably seldom or never tasted before, almost everyone nonetheless said they were drinking Coke, Pepsi or Royal Crown, the USA’s three most domestically popular cola brands:
“Identification of Cola Beverages. III. A Final Study,” N.H. Pronko and J.W. Bowles, Jr., Journal of Applied Psychology, vol. 33, no. 6, Dec 1949, pp. 605–8.
60 subjects tasted samples of Hyde Park Cola, Kroger Cola, and Spur Cola. No correct identifications were made. Almost all responses identified the beverages in order as Coca Cola, Pepsi Cola, or Royal Crown Cola.
more …
You knew it was coming sooner or later. The geniuses from Eepybird, who made an art form out of the Mentos/Diet Coke phenomenon, have harnessed their creation to propel a vehicle. Link -via Unique Daily
Coca-Cola used to contain coca, a plant that can be refined into cocaine. Bolivians are now putting it back into cola and calling it “Coca-Colla”:
The drink, made from the coca leaf and named after the indigenous Colla people from Bolivia’s highlands, went on sale this week across the South American country.
It is black, sweet and comes in a bottle with a red label – but similarities to Coca-Cola end there. One is a symbol of US-led globalisation and corporate might; the other could be considered a socialist-tinged affront to western imperialism. [...]
It is made from the coca leaf, a mild stimulant that wards off fatigue and hunger, and has been used in the Andes for thousands of years in cooking, medicine and religious rites. [...]
Bolivia tried to wipe out the leaf at Washington’s behest. But that was before Evo Morales, an Aymara Indian and coca grower, was elected president, championing coca as a crop with legitimate uses.
Link via Fast Company | Photo: Dado Galdieri/AP
Drank Drunk by practically everyone on the planet, Coca-Cola is arguably the most recognizable brand in the world. The company sells 1.5 billion units a day, and that’s not the most fascinating fact about it. The rest of this infographic has more mind-boggling statistics about the Coca-Cola Company.
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by eire79green.
Xander of Colaplaza is an avid collector of Coca-Cola cans. He now has over 8,000 different Coke cans. Check out his Wall of Coke Cans here: Link
Previously on Neatorama: 25 Strangest Collection on the Web
Samsung debuted these touch screen vending machines at CES. The machine features a large screen that shows animations and interactive menus and is also equipped with WiFi to send a signal to owners when product is running low. The machines should arrive at your local mall in 2010.
– via psfk
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by whitespace.
