“Green, nutrient-rich coffees may be on the horizon after researchers have developed a powder made from imperfect-looking broccoli that would have previously been wasted,” says a press release sent out earlier this year by CSIRO, Australia’s national science agency. Mary Ann Augustin is the lead researcher on the experiment. Ashitha Nagesh wrote an essay about this […]
Tag: Coffee
Counter-Rotation Inside a Glass of Beer Shaken Stirringly
A round of surprise appears in a glass of beer—or a glass of coffee or tea—when you shake it stirringly. Details are in this study: “Counter-Rotation in an Orbitally Shaken Glass of Beer,” Frédéric Moisy, J. Bouvard, and Wietze Herreman [pictured below], EPL [Europhysics Letters], vol. 122, no. 3, no. 34002, 2018. The authors, at Université […]
Did You Smell the Coffee? [In the Footsteps of the Invisible Gorilla]
Charles Spence (Ig Nobel Prize winner for the electronically-modified-sound-of-a-potato-chip experiment) and a colleague have a new study that explores an unexplored aspect—smell—of what’s known as “inattentional blindness.’ Inattentional blindness became widely noticed because of the “invisible gorilla experiment” that won an Ig Nobel Prize for Chris Chabris and Dan Simons. The new study asks, in essence, […]
Many People Look at Many Other Looks at Other People Who May Have Been Drinking Coffee and Thinking
The mystery of whether drinking coffee affects people’s minds is still mysterious, thanks to the results of a new, complex academic study of many old, complex academic studies: “Habitual coffee consumption and cognitive function: a Mendelian randomization meta-analysis in up to 415,530 participants,” Ang Zhou, Amy E. Taylor, Ville Karhunen, et al., Scientific Reports, epub […]
Moving Chairs in Starbucks: Rice-Wheat Cultural Differences in China
The famed Chinese cultural divide — wheat-centric in the north, rice-centric in the south — plays out even in today’s coffee shops, suggests this new study: “Moving Chairs in Starbucks: Observational Studies Find Rice-Wheat Cultural Differences in Daily Life in China,” Thomas Talhelm, Xuemin Zhang, and Shigehiro Oishi, Science Advances, Vol. 4, no. 4, April […]
Some Kinds of Coffee Are More Fragrantly Attractive to Ants
Humans are not the only animals that (in many cases) are attracted by the smell of coffee. This study focuses on ants’ attraction to coffee smells: “Olfactory behavior and response of household ants (Hymenoptera) to different types of coffee odor: A coffee-based bait development prospect,” Abdul Hafiz Ab Majid, Hamady Dieng, Siti Salbiah Ellias, Faezah […]
Further physics insight from walking backwards with coffee
“The authors derive their inspiration from an Ig Nobel prize-winning paper describing a basic mechanical model that investigates the results of walking backwards while carrying a cup of coffee.” So says the report “Mathematical model reveals solution to sloshing coffee,” in Phys.org. The Ig Nobel Prize-winning paper about walking backwards while carrying a cup of coffee […]
Coffee Intake and Incidence of Erectile Dysfunction [research study]
A new study about erectile dysfunction suggests — and also does not suggest — that drinking decaffeinated coffee ups a person’s risk of having erectile dysfunction, especially if the person is a male. The study is: “Coffee Intake and Incidence of Erectile Dysfunction,” David S. Lopez, Lydia Liu, Eric B. Rimm, Konstantinos K. Tsilidis, Marcia de […]
Effect of Explosion-Puffed Coffee on Fruit Flies [research study]
Fruit flies can be measurably affected by explosion-puffed coffee, suggests this new study: “Effect of Explosion-Puffed Coffee on Locomotor Activity and Behavioral Patterns in Drosophila melanogaster,” Bong Soo Ko, So Hyun Ahn, Dong Ouk Noh, Ki-Bae Hong, Sung Hee Han, and Hyung Joo Suh, Food Research International, epub 2017. The authors, at several institutions in […]
Six Cups of Coffee Goes to Your Head, for Surgical Guidance [research study]
A special hat filled with six cups’ worth of ground coffee may make it easier for surgeons to succeed at some kinds of nose and throat surgery. This study presents the news: “Coffee: the key to safer image-guided surgery—a granular jamming cap for non-invasive, rigid fixation of fiducial markers to the patient,” Patrick S. Wellborn […]