Yahoo! Finance and The Week The Trend Desk

But it's not just the future that belongs to designers, artists, and inventors -- it's sexual success, too. According to a new research report in "The Proceedings of the Royal Society B", a British biology journal, the more creative a person is, the more sexual partners he or she is likely to have.

In the article (headlined coyly, "Schizotypy, Creativity, and Mating Success in Humans"), the University of Newcastle's Daniel Nettle and Open University's Helen Clegg discussed their study of 425 British men and women, which found that "professional artists and poets have around twice as many sexual partners as those who do not indulge in these creative activities."

Why are poets and painters so accomplished in the sexual realm? It's partly the nature of what they do. Creative types, Nettle and Clegg maintain, draw attention to themselves and try to absorb people in their work. And that can lead to more of what the biologists delicately call "mating opportunities." In addition, the same curiosity that spurs such people to create may also lead them to seek novel experiences beyond the page or palette.

Consider it a holiday two-fer: What's good for your economic fortunes may also be good for your love life.

BRICs, TVTs, and a "Mini-China"

In 2003, Goldman Sachs described an emerging economic force that it called BRIC -- Brazil, Russia, India, and China. These four countries were changing the rules of the global economy, growing at tremendous rates, and providing a new source of workers and customers for the rest of the world. Indeed, Goldman estimates that the BRIC economies could be larger than those of the G6 (Group of Six industrialized nations: U.S., U.K., Japan, Italy, Germany, and France) by 2035.

But now, this fast-growing foursome may have some company. The TVTs -- Thailand, Vietnam, and Turkey -- are up-and-comers to watch out for, says business strategist Kenichi Ohmae. These countries -- as both producers and consumers -- are expanding at an equally rapid clip.

Joseph Quinlan, chief market strategist for Bank of America, also points our gaze to central Europe. The area from the Baltics to the Balkans, he says, is the fastest growing component of Europe. With its increasing manufacturing prowess and surging consumer demand, this region -- often little noticed in the press -- is becoming a "mini-China."

Small Is Beautiful (and Slimming)

Forget appetite suppressing drugs and gastric-bypass surgery. The secret to losing weight may be surprisingly low-tech. In an intriguing experiment earlier this year, Cornell University researchers served one group of study subjects two-week-old popcorn in a 4.2 ounce container and another group the same food in an 8.4 ounce tub.

"When moviegoers were served stale popcorn in big buckets," the Cornell team reports, "they ate 34 percent more than those given the same stale popcorn in medium-sized containers."

Meantime, University of Pennsylvania researchers conducted a related experiment using M&Ms. They placed a bowl of the candy at the concierge desk of an apartment building. Then they put signs above the bowl that read, "Eat your fill," and "Please use the spoon to serve yourself."

What happened? "If presented with a small spoon, most passersby would take a single scoop, even though the sign encouraged them to take more. If given a much larger spoon, the subjects would still take a single scoop, even though that one scoop contained much more candy."

In other words, what determined how much they ate wasn't the subjects' hunger or even the license to gorge. It was the size of the spoon.

These Ivy League snack studies tell us something about what's called "unit bias." We eat amounts that conform to our sense of cultural norms. We'll eat that one serving no matter how large the serving is. That's what everyone else must be doing, right?

So go with the flow of human behavior by offering smaller servings of the bad stuff, larger servings of the good stuff: Milk Duds in Dixie cups, carrots in gigantic bowls. And, yes, there's already a diet book in the making that's built on this general concept. Next fall, powerHouse Books comes out with "The Nine-Inch Diet", which calls for losing weight ... by using smaller plates.

Kakuro Nation

I've frequently seen The Trend Desk's workers engaged in sudoku. No, that has nothing to do with the first entry in this column. Sudoku, for the uninitiated, is a Japanese puzzle -- a nine-box-by-nine-box grid on which the player must fill all the empty squares so that the numbers 1 to 9 appear once in each row, in each column, and in each three-by-three box.

If you've been on an airplane, browsed your bookstore, or turned to the comics page of a newspaper recently, you know that sudoku mania has gripped North America, Europe, and Asia. In the U.S. alone, publishers have sold upwards of 3 million sudoku books this year.

But just as sudoku fever is cresting, another Japanese puzzle game is beginning to infect the culture. This one is called kakuro. Also known as "cross sums," kakuro is like an arithmetic crossword puzzle. As in sudoku, it involves placing the digits 1 through 9 in boxes on a grid, only this time you also have to make the sums of the rows and columns reach certain totals indicated on the puzzle. (See a simple kakuro and its solution here: http://www.kakuro.net/walkthrough/1/1.html).

Mark my words: Kakuro is next year's sudoku.

Mark these words, too: 2006 will be just as puzzling as 2005. Have a joyous, peaceful, and, um, creative holiday season.

Got a tip, tidbit, or treat for "The Trend Desk"? Drop us a line at dantrend@danpink.com.