Yesterday, I stumbled upon two links that I found interesting. The first was the map-based data visualization blog post 40 Maps That Will Help You Make Sense of the World, in which maps 24 and 28 hint at a correlation (click for larger interactive versions):
The first map shows the number of researchers per million inhabitants in each country. The second map shows the number of kg coffee consumed per capita per year. As ChartsBin allows you to download the data behind each map, I did so and produced a scatter plot that confirms the strong correlation (click for larger version):
This confirms my view that the coffee machine is the most important piece of hardware in a bioinformatics group. Bioinformaticians with coffee can do work even without a computer, but bioinformaticians without coffee are unable to work, no matter how good computers they have.
One should of course be careful to not jump to conclusions about causality based on correlation. This leads me to the second link: a new study published in Nature Neuroscience, which shows that Post-study caffeine administration enhances memory consolidation in humans.
I optimistically await a similar study confirming the correlation between Chocolate Consumption, Cognitive Function, and Nobel Laureates published last year in New England Journal of Medicine.
Buried Treasure 