IS CHOCOLATE the key to cognitive success? Curious about the much-heralded benefits of flavonoids, found in chocolate as well as wine, Franz Messerli of St Lukeās-Roosevelt Hospital in New York collected data on average chocolate consumption in various countries and compared it to those countriesā per-capita share of last yearās Nobel prizes.
Switzerland stood at the top of both rankings, and when Messerli plotted the numbers for other countries, they showed an impressively strong correlation, in the New England Journal of Medicine (vol 367, p 1562).
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āThe minimally effective chocolate dose seems to hover around 2 kilograms per year,ā Messerli states, āand the dose-response curve reveals no apparent ceiling on the number of Nobel laureates at the highest chocolate-dose level of 11 kilograms per year.ā In other words ā if we have understood this right ā the more chocolate people eat, the more Nobel prizes their country gets.
It remains to be determined whether chocolate provides the vital brain boost, says Messerli, but, as a native of Switzerland himself, he admits to āregular daily chocolate consumptionā.
The discovery came as no surprise to Eric Cornell, a US physicist who received the Nobel prize in physics in 2001. āI attribute essentially all my success to the very large amount of chocolate that I consume,ā , and he heartily endorsed dark chocolate as āthe way to goā when pursuing physics laurels.
Chocolate alone may not do the trick for most of us, but Feedback predicts it could put Messerli on track for a future Ig Nobel prize.
Mike Wood is puzzled by an advert for David Ormerod Hearing Centres in his local paper, the Chester Chronicle: āNew invisible hearing aid has to be seen to be believedā
āSUPER-RECOGNISERSā, the Ā鶹“«Ć½ feature āFace saversā explained, are people who work for the police and security services, putting names to the faces of criminals and rioters in crowds (15 September, p 36).
Only a few people have the natural gift of rapidly remembering and mentally indexing many faces. The security services are always on the lookout for new recruits.
This is where Feedback can help. Talent scouts should take a trip to the 12th-century castle and village of Guadalest, perched high in remote mountains near Alicante in Spain.
Cars and tour buses must be parked on the edge of the village. Tourists then trek up to the castle battlements through a steep tunnel hewn out of the mountain.
Later, when they leave, they are accosted by vendors offering key rings for a few Euros. Already embedded in each ring is a miniature photo of the tourist.
How did it get there? After a while, we worked out that a hidden camera, probably in the entry tunnel, snaps mugshots of all the tourists passing through. Each shot is rapidly printed, so that by the time the tourists have finished their tour, all the portraits have been embedded in key rings and pinned to boards alongside the exit path.
The final step depends on the street vendors being super-recognisers. As the tourists walk back down to the car park, the vendors spot facial likenesses, grab the correct miniature from literally hundreds on several boards and offer it to the tourist pictured.
āItās a miracle,ā said a German woman as she was stopped and handed her own portrait.
One mystery remains. Feedback was not offered a miniature and could find no portrait of the Feedback physiognomy on the gallery boards. Weāre still wondering why.
UK PRIME MINISTER David Cameron famously signed off text messages to former Sun editor Rebekah Brooks with āLOLā. He thought it stood for ālots of loveā.
Reader Gethin Coles writes to tell us that his 11-year-old son has no doubts about the meaning. When he comes across things he finds funny, āhe has started to say āLOL!ā out loud,ā says Gethin. āDoes that mean that he LOLOLās?ā But then, Gethin notes, āLOL on its own could stand for LOL Out Loud.ā That would make it a recursive acronym, just as PHP stands for Personal-Home-Page Hypertext Preprocessor, Gethin observes.
āI need to get out more,ā he concludes.
Day of the spineless creatures
TALKING of David Cameron and others like him, our US colleague Jeff Hecht reports receiving a press release entitled āSpineless creatures that rule the worldā.
āI thought the headline referred to politicians,ā says Jeff. In fact, the press release was issued by the International Union for Conservation of Nature and concerned invertebrates and how very important they are.
FINALLY, the apples bought by a reader named Yertle Turtle had labels reading: ā100% pure Applesā.
Yertle found that the same description appears on the website .
āWhat,ā Yertle wants to know, āwould a 98 per cent pure apple look like?ā