McDonald’s USA will be giving away the limited edition, and probably-more-revolutionary-than-actually-needed Suction Tube for Reverse Axial Withdrawal (the STRAW) at participating restaurants nationwide. As long as there’s shake coming through the bottom, you close off the pressure system to the tip of the J. 
 
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 Over the course of 100 or so shakes bought from McDonald’s, they worked out the finer details. The chain’s new STRAW, which stands for Suction Tube for Reversal Axial Withdrawal, was created by JACE and NK Labs and is meant to suck the ideal flavor ratio of 50 percent chocolate and 50 percent mint in each sip of the seasonal milkshake.
– A new McDonald's marketing stunt has managed to catch the attention of tech and food blogs because of its weird premise: the redesign of the humble straw. The chain hired two respected engineering firms—people behind Google, NASA, and DARPA projects—to build a straw that allows for the perfectly-proportioned sucking of its dual-layer Chocolate Shamrock Shake, reports Engadget. For the uninitiated, the seasonal shake is essentially a mint shake on top of a chocolate shake—so how to get both flavors at once? The robotic and aerospace engineers concocted a rigid, muti-holed, J-shaped gizmo that looks "more like mountain-climbing equipment than any straw we've ever seen," notes a post at GoodFood. (It adds that complaints about McDonald's straws in regard to shakes are real and have been around for a while.) The weird part? "It works," writes a blogger at Fast Company, though he found that he couldn't get to the very bottom of the shake with the efficiency of an old-fashioned straw. Yes, it's "comedic over-engineering," as he puts it, and McDonald's is playing along with the grandiose acronym of STRAW, which stands for Suction Tube for Reverse Axial Withdrawal. As Vocativ notes, the company's video pushing the product seems to be a jokey parody of an Apple rollout. McDonald's has released a limited-edition run of 2,000 STRAWs at 80 locations nationwide. If it's a hit, the chain might bring it back later for a wider audience. (The condom, too, has recently undergone a major redesign.)