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Hiccupops: 13-year-old girl invents lollipop to cure hiccups

Mallory Kievman, 13, had the hiccups. So the innovative Connecticut teen set about researching a cure, eventually creating a successful one in her family's kitchen: hiccup-ending lollipops she's named Hiccupops.

Made from apple cider vinegar and sugar, the lollipops are designed to overstimulate throat nerves responsible for the hiccup contractions, cancelling out "the message to hiccup," she told the New York Times.

She admits she's still "tweaking the taste."

"I was reading an article somewhere about uses for vinegar and apple cider vinegar was in that story for getting rid of hiccups," she told Mashable.

"Lots of home remedies use something that is either very sweet or very tart. So she used both. She used the tartness of the apple cider vinegar and the sweetness of sugar. So I think it is a really ingenious concept," said Dr. Robynne Chutkan, a gastroenterologist with Medstar Georgetown University Hospital.

The patent-pending pops, developed after two years of research and hundreds of home-remedy experiments, have made the competition rounds, with Hiccupops being recognized at the 2011 Connecticut Innovation Convention for kids for its "innovation and patentability."

The young CEO is now working with a team of MBA students from the University of Connecticut in building her company, hoping to being Hiccupops to market this summer.

"It's a nifty invention and it has some terrific potential benefits for society," said Christopher Levesque, team mentor and director of the Connecticut Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation. "It straddles that line between an attractive, go-to product that people might like to savour and a helpful nutraceutical aid. It's innovative, born of some real ingenuity."