attention chiliheads!!! todays' google doodle honours wilbur scoville's 151st birthday--cool

interactive doodle about some of the peppers.


Who was Wilbur Scoville? The science behind what makes chillies so hot
The inventor of the Scoville test has been commemorated with a Google Doodle on his 151st birthday



Hot chilli peppers have been credited with helping to lose weight, inducing labour and relieving pain. But until Wilbur Scoville, there was no objective way of measuring how hot chillies really are. Scoville, an American chemist born 151 years ago on Friday, is responsible for the "Scoville organoleptic test", a scale of "hotness" that has been the definitive rating of how spicy a chilli is for more than 100 years.

On his birthday, Google has saluted Scoville with an interactive Doodle that asks visitors to assist his experiments by cooling the chillies' heat. By clicking the mouse at the correct point on a sliding bar, you can fire ice cream at the offending chilli to neutralise it, with the game getting more difficult as they get hotter.

The Scoville scale, which measures the concentration of capsaicin - the active component that gives chillies their hotness - runs from the bell pepper, with a rating of zero Scoville heat units (or SHU), to the 16 million that represents pure capsaicin. Capsaicin is the compound that gives you the characteristic burning sensation in your mouth, when you eat chillies.

The hottest chillies, such as the Carolina Reaper and Trinidad Moruga, can reach around 2 million SHU, and many of these have only been discovered in recent years. Just nine years ago, the Bhut Jolokia was the first to pass one million SHU. Tabasco sauce sits at 1200-1500, while the Jalapeno is at just 2,500-5,000. The Cayenne pepper is between 30,000 and 50,000.

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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/google-doodle/12113018/Who-was-Wilbur-Scoville-The-science-behind-what-makes-chillies-so-hot.html