As candy bowls start appearing in offices ahead of Halloween, one of medicine's oddest experiments offers a reminder of how quickly free sweets vanish. In 2013, a group of UK doctors quietly placed boxes of chocolates on hospital wards and recorded exactly when each piece disappeared.
The median chocolate lasted just 51 minutes. When the team applied statistical tools normally used to track patient survival, it found that a box empties much like a radioactive sample decays: quickly at first, then more slowly as fewer pieces remain.
