Scientists in Australia have moved a small step closer to explaining one of the last great unsolved mysteries of the universe: why spoons disappear.
The findings may have implications for a related paradox from the world of Irish traditional music, where it has been noted that people who play the spoons never disappear, despite the fervent wishes of other instrumentalists that they would.
In the groundbreaking study, researchers at a medical institute in Melbourne secretly numbered 70 teaspoons and tracked their movements over a period of five months.
As expected, some 80 per cent of the spoons went missing, although the rate of loss was significantly higher in communal areas of the facility than in private ones.
"At this rate, an estimated 250 teaspoons would need to be purchased annually to maintain a workable population of 70," the researchers concluded in an article published in today's British Medical Journal.
Despite suffering decades of abuse at the hands of Uri Geller, spoons have attracted little interest from academics until now. Spoon-loss is a particularly neglected field of scientific research, even lagging behind the question of why so many individual socks go missing.
So, regretting that the area was "strangely bereft" of literature, the team from the Macfarlane Burnet Institute for Medical Research and Public Health felt free to engage in fanciful speculation about the disappearing teaspoons' fate.
With a nod to Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, they surmised that the spoons could be quietly migrating to a planet populated by "spoonoid" life forms living in a state of spoonish nirvana.
But the group agreed that the most likely explanation for the disappearance is that people just take them.
Teaspoons are small and easily hidden. This means that for potential petty larcenists they are, all too often, a stainless steal. (Additional reporting by Reuters)
