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Duke Alum-Entrepreneur Helps Solve Ketchup Problem

Brian Solomon, Pratt '11, Graduate student at MIT

Science to the rescue, finally, writes The Huffington Post. MIT PhD candidate Dave Smith and his team of mechanical engineers (which includes Brian Solomon, a former Pratt Fellow who majored in Mechanical Engineering) and nano-technologists from the Varanasi Research Group, have finally solved our ages-old debate on how to best get condiments out of the bottle.

Prior to this invention, the extraction of ketchup from the bottle has been a point of pride for some. Everyone's method is different. Some advocate jamming a butter knife into the neck of the bottle to dislodge the contents. According to its website, Heinz 57 recommends applying "a firm tap to the sweet spot on the neck of the bottle -- the "57." Our children may never have to know this trick, thanks to LiquiGlide. The super slippery, non-toxic coating keeps condiments like ketchup, mayo and mustard from sticking to the sides of glass and plastic bottles, and allows them to slip right down to the most important place: your food.

Check out the video to see how simple condiment dispensing is about to become.

Smith told Austin Carr at Fast Company that they were originally interested in applying the LiquiGlide coating to car windshields and the insides of gas or oil lines that frequently clog. We are so thankful they decided to apply this amazing technology to food. We'll never have to squeeze ketchup juice all over our backyard BBQ attire again!

National Public Radio also picked up on this story, noting that the MIT inventors had entered the annual MIT 100K Entrepreneurship competition -- and didn't win.

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Solomon is now pursuing a graduate degree at MIT and is a research assistant in the Varanasi Research Group, a lab at MIT.

Personal goal: My goal is to develop technologies that have foreseeable future applications and the potential to sustain successful business ventures. I am a firm believer in the role of technology as a means of improving humanity and aim to leverage my experience, skills, and work ethic to drive viable technologies to the forefront.

Lab's mission:  The mission of the Varanasi Research Group is to bring about transformational efficiency enhancements in various industries including energy (power generation to oil & gas to renewables), water, agriculture, transportation and electronics cooling by fundamentally altering thermal-fluid-surface interactions across multiple length and time scales. We are enabling this approach via highly interdisciplinary research focused on nanoengineered surfaces and interfaces, thermal-fluid science and new materials discovery combined with scalable nanomanufacturing for significant efficiency gains, reduction in CO2 emissions, and prevention of catastrophic failures in real industrial applications.

To contact or read more about the organization that Solomon helped start to commercialize the super-slippery coating. Liqui-Glife.com