It's the end of the so-called media "Silly Season", the summer period beloved and bemoaned in equal measure by our tabloid journalists because of the supposed absence of purportedly serious current affairs while our politicians are swanning off around Cornwall and elsewhere and the need to fill pages and pixels with news is ever-present regardless. Of course, 2014 has been quite exceptional in that the silly season was seriously full of awful news: atrocities across the Middle East of many kinds, growing tensions in Ukraine, missing aircraft, the emergence of a new highly virulent form of Ebola and yesterday…the useful chocolate teapot.
Excuse me?!
The cliché of referring to something without pros and plenty of cons as being as useful as a chocolate teapot no longer holds true as a team at an infamous chocolate manufacturer based in York came to the boil and in a lighter moment of publication relations and laterally thought out marketing took a leaf out of the Royal Society of Chemistry's old publicity book to brew up a biomaterials stunt that would make even the silliest of silly season tabloid sub-editors blush with its silliness.
John Costello took six weeks, apparently, to mould and craft a chocolate sphere made of layer upon, dipped layer of dark chocolate containing 65 percent cocoa solids (perfect) to create a heat-resistant teapot. The pot was to allow a decent cuppa to be mashed in a couple of minutes before the pot succumbed to an inevitable onslaught of enthalpy, Gibb's energy and the second law of thermodynamics - it melted.
The stunt was seen by the vast audience of BBC television's "The One Show" (a couple of million people at a guess). I assume it was seen, but often and sadly when the science section of such magazine shows pops up, many viewers head for the kitchen to make a brew of their own, ironically enough. I don't think there are any serious implications for biomimetics and natural product nano composites, to be honest.
Thankfully, now that the silly season is well and truly over we can but hope to get back to the straightforward doom and gloom of the usual politics and current affairs of people pulling each other apart when they should really be pulling together to solve serious problems like disease, sanitation, water and food security, climate change and sourcing sustainable energy supply.
Oh, but wait…Professor Stephen Hawking has issued a warning that the "God particle" the Higgs boson that Hawking suggested would never be found that was spotted in the Large Hadron Collider in 2012, could destroy the known universe in a quantum fluctuation that creates an ever-expanding vacuum bubble. Thankfully, the probability factor means that it could take 10100 years for that to come to pass, which is quite a few summer silly season's for us to get through with the help of the tabloid press before the end of time. Now, anyone fancy a cuppa? Milk, no sugar, thanks.
David Bradley blogs at Sciencebase Science Blog and tweets @sciencebase, he is author of the popular science book "Deceived Wisdom".