Coffee may cut the risk of dementia by blocking the damage cholesterol can inflict on the body, research suggests.

The drink has already been linked to a lower risk of Alzheimer’s Disease. A vital barrier between the brain and the main blood supply of rabbits fed a fat-rich diet was protected in those given a caffeine supplement.

UK experts said it was the “best evidence yet” of coffee’s benefits.

The “blood brain barrier” is a filter which protects the central nervous system from potentially harmful chemicals carried around in the rest of the bloodstream.

{ BBC | Continue reading }

photo { Matt Hoyle }

1. It’s believed that a couple cups of coffee may help open airways for those with asthma. Though it should never be used to replace traditional asthma medicine, the caffeine in coffee is similar to a medicine called theophylline, which is used to treat asthma symptoms.

2. Coffee is known to increase concentration and short-term memory, so it can also help the brain function better while on long flights. Coffee’s ability to make a person more alert will also help adjust a person’s internal clock in a new time zone.

3. Caffeine’s target region in the brain is the prefrontal cortex–the area associated with short-term memory. In this area, the brain compares current experiences with experiences stored in long-term memory–a pattern linked to creative thinking. Coffee is believed to be a cognitive enhancer and an aid in concentration, especially on intellectual tasks.

4. The most common reason people drink coffee (other than for pleasure) is to stay alert–especially in the morning. Research shows that coffee works best if spread throughout the course of the day. For instance, instead of drinking two cups at once, have one cup in the morning and another an hour or two later.

5. Studies show that the caffeine in coffee improves performance and endurance during intense physical exercise. Caffeine is also shown to boost short-term athletic performance and to help enhance concentration through it’s effect on brain receptors. It’s also known to slightly increase metabolism, which can help people lose weight.

6. Studies link coffee drinking and the prevention of degenerative diseases. Research shows that the more coffee a person drinks, the lower their risk is of developing Parkinson’s disease. Studies show those who drink coffee on a daily basis may also be 60% to 80% less likely to develop Parkinson’s.

7. Doctors at the Harvard School of Public Health discovered that men who drink four or more cups of caffeinated coffee per day have a lower risk of developing gallbladder stones. Over the course of a decade, the study followed more than 45,000 men who had not had gallbladder stone problems. The reason for this preventative effect is still unknown.

8. An antioxidant in coffee called methylpyridinium has been shown to significantly reduce the risk of colorectal and other cancers. The compound, which is formed during the roasting process of coffee beans, is found almost exclusively in coffee and is said to boost blood enzymes.

9. Drinking four cups of coffee per day may reduce the risk of liver cirrhosis by approximately 30%. Studies show that coffee not only has detoxifying properties that cleanse the liver, but the antioxidants found in coffee also work as free-radical scavengers to ward off disease and illness. A research team at the U.S. National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases analyzed data from a nutrition survey of 16,000 people. The results showed that those who drank caffeinated beverages exhibited lower incidences of liver injury–though it is unknown exactly how caffeine benefits liver function. Another study by researchers at the National Cancer Center in Tokyo found that coffee drinkers were half as likely as nondrinkers to develop liver cancer.

10. Many studies have confirmed that coffee has properties that prevent Type II diabetes. A study conducted at the Harvard University School of Public Health found that drinking coffee can cut the risk of developing Type II diabetes by 50% in men and by 30% in women. A Finnish study found that women who drank three to four cups of coffee per day reduced their risk of diabetes by 29%, while men who drank them same amount reduced their risk by 27%.

{ Forbes }

In a study to be published in the February issue of The Journal of Pain, a team of University of Georgia researchers finds that moderate doses of caffeine, roughly equivalent to two cups of coffee, cut post-workout muscle pain by up to 48 percent in a small sample of volunteers.

{ Physorg }

photo { Lastnightsparty.com }

{ This coffee maker is called a siphon bar, and costs $20,000. It is the only halogen-powered model in the United States, and getting it here required years of elliptical discussions with its Japanese importer | NY Times | Continue reading | How it works }

Pregnant women who drink two or more cups of coffee a day have twice the risk of having a miscarriage as those who avoid caffeine, U.S. researchers said.

They said the study provides strong evidence that high doses of caffeine during pregnancy — 200 milligrams or more per day or the equivalent of two cups of coffee — significantly increase the risk of miscarriage.

This risk appeared to be related to the caffeine, rather than other chemicals in coffee, because they also saw an increased risk when the caffeine was consumed in soda, tea, and hot chocolate.

Li said many researchers think caffeine is harmful because it stresses the fetus’ immature metabolism. It may also decrease blood flow in the placenta, which could harm the fetus.

{ Reuters | Continue reading }

photo { Toni Raquel }

A random act of kindness at a Starbucks in Florida caught on, and turned into a story of paying it forward.

It started Friday morning when one man paid for the coffee for the person in line behind him, and it went on all day.

Ironically, this chain of ‘nice’ started with anger. The customer behind the man who started the whole this was honking and yelling at him. So the man, a tai chi master, responded with a bit of zen.

{ WIS10 | Continue reading }

In Miami, Florida, it was reported that a Tai Chi master responded to a man yelling at him “with a bit of Zen” by purchasing his coffee for him, starting a chain that lasted all day long. A similar story, this one out of Riverdale, California, is now emblazoned on some of Starbucks’ ubiquitous red holiday cups. But is this really random kindness or the wily manipulations of the Starbucks’ PR team?

These seemingly spontaneous little explosions of goodwill just happen to coincide with the re-introduction of the coffee behemoth’s “Pass the Cheer” ad campaign, which debuted during last year’s holiday season. As part of the campaign, customers are encouraged to adopt the Biblical mantra “do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” presumably so that the Karmic high you are on after getting your Venti Eggnog Soy Latte for free will propel you to open your wallet and shell out your hard-earned cash upon return. The company has even set up an auxiliary website, itsredagain.com, where good-hearted caffeine addicts can start their own “Cheer Chains.”

Cynics are already speculating that the cheery stories passing through the news cycle, if not totally fabricated, are actually the results of tips from the Starbucks PR machine. (Outlets around the country, including Good Morning America, have picked up on the Pennsylvania and Florida stories). “Does anyone think a store-level employee is going to call the media to report that some people at the drive-thru are paying for each other’s drinks. AND, even if the call was made, do you think the city desk is going to jump on that story?” asks a commenter on StarbucksGossip.com.

Bridget Barker, a spokesperson for the company, denied that the chain had made up the stories or had fed them to media outlets. “Not true. These fantastic and spectacular stories just show that there is holiday cheer going around,” Barker says.

{ Radar | Continue reading }

Actually it is a PR stunt.

{ Consumerist }

related { Trouble at Starbucks }

A man has been arrested in Numazu, Shizuoka Prefecture for assaulting 5 schoolgirls with coffee via drive-by spitting attacks. The spitter, who was nicknamed “Coffee Bukake Man” by locals, had carried out 5 attacks since the end of October. All of his victims were junior high school or high school girls wearing their uniforms, and all of the attacks involved spitting coffee onto their faces from his car window.

His final attack took place on December 7th, when a 16-year-old schoolgirl he spit on was able to come to her senses quickly enough to spot his license plate number and memorize it. This led to the arrest of 26 year-old Yoshiro Sumiyama, who admitted attacking the girls. Sumiyama told police that he was irritated after having been dumped by a woman and carried out the spitting attacks to relieve some stress.

[Language note: Bukkake comes from the Japanese verb bukkakeru, which means to splash or to douse.]

{ Japan Probe | Continue reading }

previously { Man squirted milk 9.2 feet out of his left eye }

photo { Barris.com }

Sleepy drivers who don’t want to stop their journey have two choices: pull over and take a short nap or load up with caffeine to stay awake.

So what’s the better option? French researchers decided to find out, testing the driving performance of two dozen sleep-deprived motorists. Participants first drove a two-mile course on the highway between 6 pm and 7:30 pm, to measure their driving skill on a normal amount of sleep. On other days, they were asked to take the driving test again between 2 am and 3:30 am. They were given either a placebo (decaffeinated coffee), regular coffee or allowed to take a 30-minute nap, according to the study, published this month in the medical journal Sleep.

A driving instructor in the car counted the number of inappropriate line crossings during each driving test. Line crossings were measured because drifting over the center line or off the road causes 65 percent of sleep-related accidents.

The decaf drinkers racked up a total of 159 line crossings while drowsy, compared to just 2 line crossings during the daytime driving test. Nappers did better, crossing lines only 84 times. But surprisingly, the coffee drinkers did the best in the sleepy driving test, crossing lines a total of 27 times.

But what was surprising is that the effect of coffee and napping varied by age. For middle-aged drivers, aged 40 to 50, coffee was a far better choice. Among younger drivers, a nap was almost as effective as caffeine.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

I’m a real cappuccino lover myself, but many of my female colleagues don’t seem to go for the stuff. I’d never thought too much about that until recently. I suppose I carelessly assumed that men and women have different tastes, probably as a result of different social influences. Now I know better: my female colleagues don’t go to coffee shops because they’re shabbily treated when they get there.

That’s the conclusion of the American economist Caitlin Knowles Myers. She, with her students as research assistants, staked out eight coffee shops in the Boston area and watched how long it took men and women to be served. Her conclusion: men get their coffee 20 seconds earlier than women. (There is also evidence that black people wait longer than white people, the young wait longer than the old, and the ugly wait longer than the beautiful. But these effects are statistically not as persuasive.)

Perhaps, says the sceptic, this is because women order froufrou drinks? Up to a point. The researchers found that men are more likely to order simpler drinks. Yet comparing fancy-drink-ordering men with fancy-drink-ordering women, the longer wait for women remained.

This is an intriguing piece of research because coffee shops appear to be a competitive business, and one thing we economists think we know about discrimination is that competition should tend to erode it.

The idea comes from an article published 50 years ago by the economist and Nobel laureate Gary Becker. The reasoning is simple enough: a business that deliberately offers shoddy service or uncompetitive prices to some customers, or that turns down smart minority applicants in favour of less-qualified white male applicants, is throwing money away. If it is a government bureaucracy or a powerful monopolist, that’s a loathsome but sustainable choice. But racist or sexist businesses with many competitors are likely to be shut down by the bankruptcy courts long before the human rights lawyers get to them.

{ Financial Times | Continue reading }

artwork { Ralph Goings, Cream pie, 1979 | oil on canvas }

Chemists have figured out why dark-roasted coffees are so bitter, a finding that could lead to a smoother cup of java.

Using chemical analyses and follow-up taste tests by humans trained to detect coffee bitterness, the scientists discovered the compounds that make coffee bitter and also how they form.

“Everybody thinks that caffeine is the main bitter compound in coffee, but that’s definitely not the case,” said study leader Thomas Hofmann, a professor of food chemistry and molecular sensory science at the Technical University of Munich in Germany. Just 15 percent of coffee’s bitter taste comes from caffeine.

Hofmann and his colleagues found two classes of compounds give coffee the bulk of its bitterness.

One class, called chlorogenic acid lactones, is present at high levels in light- to medium-roast brews. Dark roasts, such as espresso, showed high levels of phenylindanes, which form when the chlorogenic acid lactones break down and give a more lingering, harsh taste than their precursors. “Roasting is the key factor driving bitter taste in coffee beans. So the stronger you roast the coffee, the more harsh it tends to get,” Hofmann said.

How the beans are brewed also affects bitterness, the scientists found. The high pressures and temperatures used for brewing espresso-type coffees produce the highest levels of bitter compounds.

{ Live Science | Continue reading }

picture { Taj Palace Hotel ad }

People who take small amounts of caffeine regularly during the day may be able to avoid falling asleep and perform well on cognitive tests without affecting their nighttime sleep habits.

Researchers from Rush University Medical Center, Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School have discovered that caffeine works by thwarting one of two interacting physiological systems that govern the human sleep-wake cycle. The researchers propose a novel regimen, consisting of frequent low doses of caffeine, to help shift workers, medical residents, truck drivers, and others who need to stay awake get a bigger boost from their tea or coffee.

“I hate to say it, but most of the population is using caffeine the wrong way by drinking a few mugs of coffee or tea in the morning, or three cups from their Starbuck’s grande on the way to work. This means that caffeine levels in the brain will be falling as the day goes on. Unfortunately, the physiological process they need to counteract is not a major player until the latter half of the day,” said James Wyatt, sleep researcher and lead author on the study. { FuturePundit, May 2004 | Continue reading }

The Trojan Room coffee pot was the inspiration for the world’s first webcam. The coffee pot was located in the Trojan Room, within the old Computer Laboratory of the University of Cambridge. The webcam was created to help people working in other parts of the building avoid pointless trips to the coffee room by providing a live 128×128 grayscale picture of the state of the coffee pot.

The camera was installed on a local network in 1991 using a video capture card on an Acorn Archimedes. When web-browsers gained the ability to display images in March 1993, it was clear this would be an easier way to make the picture available. The camera was connected to the Internet in November 1993. It therefore became visible to all Internet users and grew into a popular landmark of the early web. { Wikipedia | Continue reading }

A coffee-throwing robber who hurls hot java at cashiers is wanted for at least seven North Texas robberies, police said Thursday.

The suspect is a 29-year-old man who has given cashiers minor burns since the string of daylight robberies began May 23, Dallas police spokeswoman Jamie Matthews said. Convenience stores in the Dallas suburbs of Addison and Mesquite have also been hit.

Surveillance footage from one of the robberies shows the suspect paying for the cup, then quickly tossing the coffee on the clerk before reaching over the counter and taking all the cash from the register. The clerk falls down while the suspect, wearing sunglasses and a hat, runs out of the store.

The most recent robbery was Wednesday. Dallas police identified a suspect through surveillance video and witnesses.

{ AP/WTOP }

previously { Espresso art }