Glove Compartment research

The idea for this experiment came from Corby, who told me that his dad keeps ibuprofen in his glove compartment of his car. I started thinking about how hot it might get in a glove compartment, especially in Charleston in the summertime. So we decided to package up several brands of ibuprofen and send them to people around the country to store in their glove compartment over the summer. The packages look like this:


There are seven brands of ibuprofen pills, including name brand (Advil and Motrin) as well as several generic brands (Walgreens, WalMart, Costco, etc.)

The packages will be left in the glove compartments from Memorial Day weekend until Labor Day weekend. (To our participants, if the packages are not in your glove compartment yet, that's OK. Just let us know what day they are put in.) Then our participants will send them back to us for analysis.

We know from our lab experiments that ibuprofen pills that are exposed to heat and humidity over time will degrade. In the glove compartments, we only expect them to be exposed to heat, because the package will protect them from high humidity. So we don't really know what might happen. We'll be monitoring the temperatures of the locations, and we will note which cars spend days and/or nights in garages and which ones don't. Here is a map to show you all of the locations across the country that we are lucky enough to have access to glove compartments.