Some of you may have seen Idiocracy, in which Luke Wilson plays Joe Bauers, an army corporal chosen for a suspended animation experiment due to the fact that he is completely average in every way. Lots of things go wrong with the experiment, and instead of waking up after a few months, he wakes up 500 years later, to find that the world has gotten, well, dumber.

One of the things he finds out is that a company that sells a sports drink, Brawndo, has replaced all water with their drink, including the water used to irrigate crops. Brawndo’s slogan? “Electrolytes. They’re What You Crave.”

Electrolytes are ionic compounds that ionize in water. Strong electrolytes ionize completely, and conduct electricity well in solution (think about the conductivity example we did in class with sodium chloride). Weak electrolytes (like acetic acid) don’t ionize completely, and therefore don’t conduct electricity as well. Nonelectrolytes are substances that don’t ionize in water (sugars and alcohols are examples).

Electrolytes are actually quite important, so sports drinks do serve a useful purpose. A couple of years ago I was at the Grand Canyon, and a hiker died of water intoxication. Basically, he drank too much water without eating anything, and developed an electrolyte imbalance.