C. Coville wrote about strange cases of one country building market dominance in weird things:

• Sweden is responsible for a lot of our pop music. Producers and musicians increasingly come from the country, in part because the government launched several music schools, and now one in three Swedish children attend after-school music programs.
• We can thank India for the best hair extensions. Since many Indian women don’t treat or blow dry their hair, they make for the best tresses. Some then cut their hair at a temple as an offering, and the clippings are auctioned off for community funds.
• A good number of the Avengers – and movie stars in general – are Australian. Reasons for this include that they’re cheaper than American actors, and project a more chiseled action hero image, than American ones who tend to be more boyish.

Check out the rest of the article which includes musings on the spread of Wahhabism, why producers have to coerce Chris Evans to become Captain America, and more over here.

Source: Cracked

The world’s demand for Nutella is causing a shortage of hazelnuts writes Dan Charles:

• Most hazelnuts come from a narrow strip of land around the black sea in Turkey.
• Ferrero, the maker of Nutella, is responsible for the consumption of about 25% of the world’s hazelnuts.
• This year there was a frost in Turkey that cut production in half, causing prices to rise by 60%.
• The world’s demand for the nut is encouraging other countries to start production. Chile, Australia, and America are all starting or expanding hazelnut growing operations.
• Humans aren’t the only creatures that love the nut; one of the biggest challenges of growing them is keeping the squirrels away.

Read about the hazelnut market, find out why it’s so difficult to grow them in America, and find out about one scientist that might have figured out a way to do so anyway over here.

Source: NPR

Selfies are the current big thing. Drones are meant to be the next one. Put them together and you get the selfie drone. Sonali Kohli wrote:

• Nixie is a concept drone that you wear around your wrist.
• When it’s time to take a photo you launch the drone by flicking your wrist. The more power you flick it with, the further up it goes.
• It will then snap a few photos, and land back on your wrist.
• The creators are seeking $500,000 to bring the device to production. If they’re successful they intend to release it next year and sell it for less than $1,000.

Read more about the idea, and see a video with more details about it here.

Source: Quartz

Christian Rudder, a co-founder of OkCupid, wrote about what the site has learnt about love:

Up until the age of 30 women prefer men who are slightly older than them. After that they prefer men who are slightly younger.

• Overall though women typically want a man around the same age as them. Men, on the other hand, prefer twenty year olds no matter how old they are.
• White people like to talk about their hair.
• The relationship between a woman’s attractiveness, and the amount of interest people show in her profile, operates on the exponential Richter scale. The difference between a 1.0 and a 2.0 in terms of beauty is small, but the difference between a 9.0 and a 10.0 is cataclysmic.
• Three quarters of all successful couples agree that they either like or dislike horror movies. About as often as they agree on the existence of God.

Read some more fascinating insights here.

Source: The Guardian

John Kelly took a look at the size of our drinking straws:

• Straws used to be natural bits of dry rye grass. They added an unfortunate grassy taste to drinks.
• So an inventor in 1888 patented a straw made of paper. The inventor hated getting seeds in his lemonade, so the diameter of the straw was just small enough to prevent the typical lemon seed from getting sucked in.
• The next big innovation in the world of straws was in 1937 when the bendy straw came along.
• Then in the 1960s we got plastic straws.
• And then in 1988 straws became weird. They became really wide, possibly because McDonald’s milk shakes were so thick that a typical straw couldn’t handle them.
• Since chains prefer to standardize items to cut down costs, this meant that all straws, not just those used for milk shakes, became wider.

Read what this increase in the diameter of straws says about the obesity pandemic, details about the inventors we have to thank for our straws, and the straw industry standards in use today here.

Source: The Washington Post

Looking for a new company CEO? Just stand by the finish line of a marathon and ask for resumes writes Zach Wener-Fligner:

• A study found that companies with CEOs who run marathons are 5% more valuable than those that don’t.
• This is particularly true of those who are in positions or industries that will subject them to excessive amounts of stress. In such cases the boost to a company’s value is up to 10%.
• This may be because of the stress relieving effects of running.
• Boards are becoming wise to this. Aside from a blip during the great recession the number of marathon runner CEOs has risen steadily.

Read more here.

Source: Quartz

 Kate Gammon wrote about the impact that keyboards are having on babies:

• Humans have a preference for typing words with keys on the right side of a standard QWERTY keyboard.
• This is theorized to be because there are fewer keys on the right side, making it easier to type. This also explains why the effect holds true for both left and right handed individuals.
• The “QWERTY effect” as it is known also seems to be affecting baby names.
• Since the 1990s, when the keyboard became more widely used, names with letters on the right side of the keyboard such as Olivia, Jacob, and Mia have become more popular.

Read what this says about humanity’s evolving relationship with language, and details of other research into the QWERTY effect here.

Source: Popular Science

Coke has been branding its soft drinks with people’s names in a marketing campaign that’s been immensely successful writes Mike Esterl:

• The soft drinks maker took the 250 most popular names among millennials and printed them on its bottles and cans.
• The marketing campaign boosted sales by 2.5% – a reversal in a long term trend of declining soda sales.
• Meanwhile sales at rival PepsiCo have continued to stagnate.
• Bottles with specific names on them can be found on eBay for multiples of what the drinks originally cost.
• Coke also launched a website which allowed people to create virtual drinks with whatever name they desired and share it on social media. 6 million bottles were created.
  • At least one couple went across their state looking for bottles with their names on them. They found them and plan to display them along with their wedding photos.
• The campaign is coming to an end but executives may launch it again next year.

Read about the inception of the idea, other countries where it has been successful, and more over here.

Source: The Wall Street Journal

Last year Facebook analyzed the profiles of users who have been in love. Here’s what it found:

• Facebook can predict who’ll end up in a relationship. Timeline posts rapidly increase in the 100 days leading up to the start of a relationship.
• They then fall as online interactions are presumably replaced with physical ones.

• Half of all relationships that manage to survive three months, go on to survive at least four years.
• Breakups are most likely to happen during the summer, and least likely in February, probably due to Valentine’s Day.
• The number of breakups expanded in 2011, perhaps as a result of a recovering economy.

Find out how religion affects relationships, the touchy subject of age, and how interactions change once a relationship commences over here.

Source: Facebook

Via: Quartz

As China continues its rise people, including President Obama’s daughter, are increasingly looking to learn Mandarin. Nikhil Sonnad wrote that the language isn’t as dominant in China as people think:

• According to the Chinese government, only 70% of the country’s citizens speak Mandarin, and of those only 10% are fluent in it.
• This means that learning to speak anything more than basic Mandarin won’t really help in communicating with over 93% of China.
• Add in those from Taiwan, and the Chinese diaspora abroad, and there are about 120 million fluent Mandarin speakers in the world.
• In contrast Spanish, a more popular second language in the west, is spoken by 400 million people in the world.
• Even if China goes onto dominate the international order Mandarin is unlikely to become the lingua franca due to the difficulty that people have learning it.

Read about what the rest of China speaks, what the Japanese example tells us, and other Asian languages that have a comparable number of speakers but aren’t given much attention over here.

Source: Quartz