A Swiss cardiologist plots a cheeky graph that demonstrates a country's chocolate consumption could predict its probabilities of winning a Nobel.
A Swiss cardiologist plots a cheeky graph that shows a country's chocolate consumption may predict its probabilities of winning a Nobel.
Nerds, rejoice! It is Nobel season the Oscars for lab rats, peacemakers and cognoscenti alike. Just about every fall, big thinkers close to the globe wait for a middle-of-the- evening cell phone phone from Sweden, dreaming of what they may possibly do with the $ one. two million prize.
The whole European Union won the coveted peace prize right now, although Chinese novelist Mo Yan received the literature prize yesterday for his "hallucinatory realism." ( Verify out his eye-popping take on Chinese food culture in The Republic of Wine.) And earlier in the week, American researchers picked up awards in the two chemistry and physics.
So what does it take to generate a genius worthy of a Nobel? The reply may well have anything to do with chocolate. According to a very tongue-in-cheek report published on the internet this week by the New England Journal of Medication , a country's propensity for creating Nobel laureates may just be correlated to its nationwide appetite for the sinful stuff.
Franz Messerli, a cardiologist at New York's St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital, penned the write-up, and he's carried out a lot of interviews this week.
Right after being asked to peer critique an write-up on flavanols, the substances discovered in tea, wine and chocolate, among other factors, that look to support slow down or even reverse the mental slowdowns of aging, he began to toy all around with a silly idea : If chocolate consumption could boost a septuagenarian's brain power, might it also enhance an total country's?
Messerli, who is Swiss, knew that his homeland had the highest per-capita variety of Nobel Prize winners. "It occurred to me that the Swiss also had the highest chocolate consumption in the globe," he tells The Salt. "I put two and two together and thought, 'Well, China ought to have substantially much less chocolate consumption and almost certainly not that many prizewinners per capita. Let's just plot the two.' "
1 rainy afternoon, though caught in a Katmandu hotel, Messerli got to playing about with the data. When he plugged in numbers from 23 nations, they produced a neat linear plot on the webpage : Not only was the correlation in between chocolate consumption and Nobel Prize winners quite significant, but the probability that the distribution was due to chance what researchers phone the "p- worth " was very small.
"I have published about 800 papers in peer-reviewed journals," he says, "and each single a single of them stands and falls with the p- value. And now here I come across a p- worth of.0001, and this is, to my way of considering, a totally nonsensical relation. Unless you or anybody else can come up with an explanation. I've presented it to a few of my colleagues, and no one has any thoughts."
Though Messerli's operate is not exactly Shouts & Murmurs material, The New England Journal has a historical past of occasional humor and satire. A 1984 examine examined the probable atropine poisoning of fictional characters in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. A lot more not too long ago, clinicians have reported on the rise of "Nintendoitis" (" significant ache in the region of the extensor tendon of the ideal thumb") and "Hogwarts Headaches" ("the apparent remedy for this malady that is, taking a break from reading through was rejected by two of the clients ").
The only outlier in his information set, Messerli likes to point out, is Sweden the home of the Nobel prizes. Its chocolate consumption predicts only 14 laureates, however it has made much more than double that amount.
" 1 cannot quite escape the notion that either the Nobel Committee in Stockholm has some inherent patriotic bias when assessing the candidates for these awards," he writes, "or, possibly, that the Swedes are notably sensitive to chocolate, and even miniscule amounts increase their cognition."
Kevin Charles Redmon is a journalist in Washington, D.C. His day-to-day chocolate consumption is dangerously above average.
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