Hottest Pepper and Scoville Heat Units (SHU)

Have you ever thought of the hottest pepper available? and what is the criteria? What the units, how calculates this etc....

I found out all these interesting facts,

The hottest pepper will be (hopefully), ‘Dorset Naga’ (from the family of Bangladesh ‘Naga Morich’).

".....pepper ‘Dorset Naga’ is. But exactly what is it? It is certainly a Capsicum chinense selected from the Banladeshi ‘Naga Morich’, but beyond that, we’re not quite sure what we have."

http://www.peppersbypost.biz/dorsetnaga/other_sightings.html

Seems like roots of this pepper are in North east Bangladesh and India. Naga is a tribe living in that region and large terrian is known as Nagaland/Tripura... And "Morich" is bangla word for Pepper (In northern India we call is Mirch).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorset_Naga

And how hot is this pepper,

"Two laboratories in the USA tested a sample of Dorset Naga which measured 876,000 SHU and 970,000 SHU respectively."

The current record is of,

".......the Guinness world record for the hottest chilli is currently held by Red Savina, which was once measured at 577,000 SHU"

What is SHU?

The Scoville scale is a measure of the hotness of a chilli pepper. These fruits of the Capsicum genus contain capsaicin, a chemical compound
which stimulates thermoreceptor nerve endings in the tongue, and the number of Scoville heat units (SHU) indicates the amount of capsaicin
present. Many hot sauces use their Scoville rating in advertising as a selling point.

Interesting facts.. Seems like Science has more depth than the hype of Web/IT/Telecom/Computers...

Caio for now...