Bill Gates is on a mission to make safe sex better. Gates’ foundation is offering a $100,000 reward to anyone who can come up with a plan for making a more pleasurable condom that more men will actually want to use, NBC News reports. Condoms are cheap and effective, the foundation said in a statement, but they also decrease pleasure for men. “Is it possible to develop a product without this stigma, or better, one that is felt to enhance pleasure?” it asks.
To snag the cash, applicants will have to come up with a proposal for a “Next Generation Condom,” or technologies that might help in such a thing. From there, they’ll have to show a clear testable hypothesis and data to move on to potential Phase II funding—which could net them as much as $1 million. The hope is that more widely used condoms could reduce the spread of AIDS in places like Africa; the new designs must be inexpensive enough to work in “a developing world setting.”
