Quick Buzzkill

As fun as alcohol is, there are still a few shitty downsides: you can't sober up quickly, and you often get a hangover. But Korean researchers have found a way of tweaking booze to limit the fallout without cutting its strength. I guess that's a fair trade if peace and reunification are too tall an order.

Doctors at Chungnam National University studied the properties of oxygenated alcohol - booze with oxygen bubbles added, a popular concoction in their country. In these drinks, oxygen is added the way carbonation is usually added to soda, and the scientists wanted to know if these oxygenated beverages affected people differently than non-oxygenated ones. The answer was a resounding yes.

They ran three experiments using 19.5% alcohol drinks, and measured the speed at which people's blood alcohol dropped to 0.000%. Translation - how fast did they sober up?

The drinks with the added oxygen content sobered people up 20-30 minutes faster, under the influence of the rather potent alcohol they used for the trials. 20% alcohol is around the strength of fortified wine, soju, or a very strong mixed drink, so while shaving a half hour off your drunken tomfoolery might not seem a great deal, when you're trying to fall asleep at night and combating the spins, you'll appreciate it.

The researchers also asked what would change if someone were to drink multiple oxygen-enriched drinks over the course of the night. Would there be a cumulative effect? Again, the answer was yes: people who drank oxygenated booze had less severe and fewer hangovers than people who drank the non-fizzy stuff.

So why does adding O2 to booze lessen the nasty after effects? When you drink ethanol, you body needs to oxidize it to water and carbon dioxide in order to process it. This occurs via hepatic oxidation, where the liver does its thing to counteract the liquor you've just poured down your gullet. The enzymes that process alcohol require oxygen to function, and it's thought that by storing the oxygen in the alcohol itself, the system functions more quickly and efficiently.

The oxygen-enriched alcohol beverage reduces plasma alcohol concentrations faster than a normal dissolved-oxygen alcohol beverage does. This could provide both clinical and real-life significance. The oxygen-enriched alcohol beverage would allow individuals to become sober faster, and reduce the side effects of acetaldehyde without a significant difference in alcohol's effects. Furthermore, the reduced time to a lower BAC may reduce alcohol-related accidents. It seems that these drinks can maintain a high dissolved-oxygen concentration for about 10 to 20 days before the stopper is removed, and for 70 minutes after removing the stopper, respectively, at room temperature.

This has raised such questions as how does oxygen affect the taste of the alcohol, and what drink types does it work with? But why don't you settle down, you lush...they're still working out the drink, er, kinks. And in the meantime you can try the alcohol they used for testing, which was created by Sunyang Co.