Friday night antics. I just recently convinced my husband to try drinking upside down to cure his hiccups. He laughed at me and said, “if that worked, surely everyone would know about it by now.”
So, my first question to you, my replicate samples wonderful readers, is:
Have you ever heard of curing hiccups by drinking upside down? (i.e., top of cup to top lip, lean forward, gulp, swallow).
(Poll now closed)
If so, and only if so, did it work?
(Poll now closed)
Thank you for your help in moving the important field of hiccup-prevention forward.
UPDATE (20 January 2013): Of the 27 participants who took the poll, 21 had tried the treatment. The study revealed that 62% of readers who had tried this method were able to cure their hiccups by drinking upside down. Unfortunately, I was not able to include a placebo group. Indeed, I am very thankful that the results of this study fell out in favor of the treatment working – as I am quite sure the high personal effectiveness of the treatment has a lot to do with my believing that it will work. I still do.
On a separate note, I came across (via http://nothinginbiology.org) this amazing site where you can see for yourself how publication rates in academia are correlated with gender:
http://www.eigenfactor.org/gender/
Earlier today, after reading “Self-confidence of women in science and a camel” I started thinking about why women publish less than men. My best guess is that, among other things, women are less likely to be included in large collaborative networks and may have smaller group sizes (postdocs and PhDs) – therefore they are less likely to be in senior authorship positions. Of course, this is going to be confounded with the fact that there is a clear sex * age interaction for gender bias in science, and so we would need to do the appropriate statistics to answer this properly. However, if you use the site to examine authorship in Ecology and Evolution post-1990, the trend is quite clear:
I did not run statistics on this data, partially because I would feel uncomfortable doing so without controlling for career stage, but in line with my hypothesis, women are more likely to be first authors (i.e., they did the work themselves) and very unlikely to be last authors.
The same pattern holds for Molecular and Cell
I would like to thank the developers of the site and the University of Washington for developing such an insightful and useful tool!
Koskella Lab at UC Berkeley 
There is a pressure point on your feet on the solar plexus where if you press really hard it stops your hiccups. You can do it on hands as well but better on feet 🙂
I was taught a method to cure hiccups. Works 100% for me if done. Breathe in. Inhale deeply without exhaling. Then take up to 10 additional quick breaths. Quick from the mouth like sipping from a straw. Not the easiest. If you exhale or hiccup during the process. Stop, breathe regularly and try again. Six to ten additional inhales will successfully eliminate hiccups.