The half life of a spoon
- undergroundresearc
- Jul 4, 2022
- 2 min read
Anyone who's done the dishes before knows that spoons have a tendency to run away, but Australian scientists decided they wanted to get to the bottom of this odd occurrence and learn how often this actually happens. In 2004 researchers started to notice that the teaspoons in their tearoom kept disappearing, even when they replaced them. This phenomenon intrigued them, and they decided to study it.
What they aimed to discover is the rate at which teaspoons were lost, the half-life of the spoon, and whether better quality teaspoons would manage to stick around longer. This was tested by taking the 140 employees of the Macfarlan Burnet Institute for Medical Research and Public Health and doing weekly audits to determine changes in the spoon makeup for a pilot study. For the main, longitudinal cohort study, they did weekly counts for two months, then fortnightly for three months after that. They made sure to check all visible surfaces to ensure they didn't miss any.
At the end of the five-month study, 80% of the teaspoons had gone away. The half-life was determined to be 81 days, significantly longer than the 63 days for the pilot study. Unfortunately, the higher quality teaspoons were not less likely to disappear and had no statistically significant time difference.
Interestingly, after the employees were informed that a study had occurred, 5 teaspoons were returned, yet "no one admitted to the permanent removal of a teaspoon from the institute, and no plausible explanations were advanced for the high rate of teaspoon loss." It's unknown whether we will ever be able to solve the mystery of why spoons disappear so quickly, as academia doesn't seem very keen on studying the occurrence, but more information can never be a bad thing.
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