Onion + iPod = 7 Million Clueless Viewers and Counting: The State of Science and Technology Education

What self-respecting engineer didn’t build a potato battery when young? Now there’s the 21^st century version, complete with iPod, YouTube, and a hoax. The scam: soak a white onion in Gatorade for 30 minutes, plug an iPod’s USB connector into the onion, and charge the iPod. Here’s the original YouTube video (warning: you’ll never get these wasted minutes back):

And here’s the Mythbuster’s version:

And here’s ABCNews.com’s Emily Friedman trying to act like a consumer affairs sort of investigative reporter by replicating this farce of an experiment. (Can’t embed ABC’s video. See it here.)

Incredibly, the YouTube original has now had 7 million views, which only proves one thing. If you want to get a lot of attention for something, plug an iPod (or some other wildly successful, distorted piece of Apple reality) into it.