Eye spout.

What's with the milky fountain? Last fall, Mehmet Yilmaz snorted milk up his nose, causing his left eye to well up with the cloudy liquid. Then, he shot the milk from his eye to a distance of 2.8 meters (9.2 feet).

What enabled Yilmaz to complete this calcium-loaded stunt? "There's a tiny channel called the tear duct that connects each eye with your nose," explains Dr. C. Gall Summers, an eye doctor at the University of Minnesota.

When you blink, your lacrimal (LAK-rih-mul) glands (eye part located under your eyelids that secretes tears) produce watery tears to moisten your eyes. This liquid drains through the punctum, or the pinpoint-size opening near the eye's inner corner. Then, the tears swoop down the tear duct and into your nose. That's why you get the sniffles when you cry.

For Yilmaz's milky spout, he poured milk into his cupped hands and snorted it into his nose. "To make the fluid move up his nose, he uses the pressure (force applied over an area) of snorting," says Summers. Then, Yilmaz closed his mouth, plugged his nostrils together with his fingers, and forced air into his nose. The air filled his nasal passages--and the tear duct--giving enough push power to spout the milk fountain from his eye's punctum.

But this lactose launch isn't for everyone. Yilmaz moved liquid from his nose to his eye--the reverse direction of tear traffic. "Most people have one-way valves, or doors, [located at both ends of the tear duct] that prevent this backward flow," says Dr. Aaron Fay, an eye surgeon at the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary. To spew the milk from the left eye, Yilmaz may have defective valves that allow the milky tears to travel both ways, says Fay.

That makes Yilmaz's feat udderly unusual!