It is disappointing - and suspicious - that despite being known for 70 years if not antiquity, and supposedly being easy enough for a schoolboy to discover and trivial for a university professor to immediately replicate, "the actual occurrence of the Mpemba effect is a matter of controversy".<p>Surely something so counterintuitive and yet so simple would have an extremely reliable and well-defined laboratory procedure to replicate by now. The fact that it does not is strongly suggestive of myth.