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Caffeinated Seas Found off U.S. Pacific Northwest
- cpdean 14y agoSoon: Caffeinated-Sushi snobs
- chiph 14y agoSoon: Super intelligent sharks http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0149261/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0149261/
- nickhalfasleep 14y agoWithout coffee, Washington state would be uninhabitable. I suppose leach fields and other sorts of chemical filters could prevent this and other chemical plumes. Moreover, I for one would be happy if I could retain my caffeine longer.
- pnathan 14y ago> Without coffee, Washington state would be uninhabitable. What do you mean by this? I rather like Seattle and the Cascades.
- MartinCron 14y agoIt's probably a reference to the dark damp winters. I love living in Seattle, but I remember a December trip to LA a few years ago and thought "I can't find any good coffee here, but if I lived here I might not need good coffee to keep from killing myself"
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- erichocean 14y agoI'm from Seattle. Many, many people suffer from http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/seasonal-affective-disorder/DS00195 http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/seasonal-affective-disorder... due to the weather.
- kqr2 14y agoA lot of drugs can be detected in water, e.g. prozac: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/3545684.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/3545684.stm
- stevenrace 14y agoAs well as spices that vary with season, cocaine, etc [0] ... I'm curious as to how these tests are done. I'm guessing samples are drawn and then run through a IR-spectrography machine. I wonder at what depth, how close to sewage runoff, etc. [0] http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/11/091112-drinking-water-cocaine/ http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/11/091112-drink...
- refurb 14y agoIR could never detect these compounds at that low of a level. My guess is that they are doing a extraction of water, concentrating the extracts and running a mass spec on a gas chromatographer. That's the only way you'd be able to detect stuff at the ng or pg level.
- joshuacc 14y agoContraceptive hormones as well: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/jun/02/water-system-toxic-contraceptive-pill http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/jun/02/water-syst...
- frozenport 14y agoI don't think the story is about caffeination, but rather caffeine as a marker of human waste. 45 nanograms per liter doesn't sound like a lot, especially when considering the short half life of caffeine.
- natrius 14y agoCan you give a value for the half-life of caffeine? I think you might be confusing its biological half-life with its half-life as it decomposes in water. From what I can gather, the latter isn't particularly short.
- Florin_Andrei 14y ago> considering the short half life of caffeine But the thing is - it's 45 ng/l in the whole environment around sea organisms. I don't know if that's a large dose or not, I'm just saying the half-life comment doesn't seem to apply in this case.
- bo1024 14y agoRight, we should presume that it's being replenished at the same rate it's decaying unless the measurement happened to be taken right after a big dump or something.
- frozenport 14y agoIt is not unreasonable to claim that the fish actively pump the caffeine out of their system. In many ways fish are hermetically sealed.
- driverdan 14y agoThis is from almost 6 months ago.
- gus_massa 14y agoI understand that 6 month is not a very big time for this new, but I think that this comment don't deserve so much downvotes (it's light gray now). It's not offensive and not wrong and not completely irrelevant. I can't see how many points it has. I think that 1 or 0 could be fine, 2 or -1 are a little too much/few for my taste. But its points are now too negative. Please don't abuse the downvote button.
- driverdan 14y agoI understand it. This was all over the blogs 6 months ago when it was released but I'm sure there are a lot of people who missed it the first time around. Not everyone has Google Alerts setup for "caffeine" like I do. :)
- rhplus 14y agoI'm curious to know where the highest density of Starbucks is in the world. My obvious guess is downtown Seattle or maybe Manhattan or central London. I'd love to see someone compute the metric, perhaps the highest number of Starbucks within a specific square mile or maybe the specific location on earth which has the most Starbucks within say 1 mile. http://maps.google.com/maps?q=starbucks+in+downtown+seattle http://maps.google.com/maps?q=starbucks+in+downtown+seattle
- Jagat 14y agoIn India, we have Cafe Coffee Day (CCD) instead of Starbucks. I have noticed that the concentration of CCDs in certain regions of Bangalore is much higher than that of Starbucks in Manhattan (I've been to both). At some places in Bangalore you find a CCD for every hundred square meters.
- MartinCron 14y agoAlso, if you're caring about the density of specialty coffee in Downtown Seattle (where I am now) you would want to take other shops into account. There's a Starbucks on just about every corner, but on every other corner you'll find a Stumptown or a Vita or a Ladro or a Vivace or...
- keithpeter 14y agoI've always wondered about the drivers for this density of coffee shop. The density seems a lot lower in most UK cities. Is it that people have small apartments? Or is it to save office space?
- sabat 14y agoIn other news, this is not a headline from The Onion.
- 7rurl 14y agoWhere is the proof that these elevated caffeine levels in the water are from humans? Couldn't there be some naturally occurring source of ocean caffeine? Caffeine producing sea weed, for example. Also the "high" level they measured was 45 nanograms per liter of water, which is 0.000001 parts per million. The molecular weight of caffeine is 10 times that of water which means there is one caffeine molecule for ever 10 trillion water molecules. Seems pretty insignificant to me.
- dalke 14y ago> Seems pretty insignificant to me. It repeatedly says things like "effects are unknown" and "we're not yet sure about its environmental effects," he said. "But it's a very nice tracer, even if it doesn't have a large effect, because in most parts of the world, you know that this is coming from a human waste source." Just because something seems insignificant, doesn't mean that it is. As to the caffeine sources, this summary linked to the paper's abstract. The highlights section, with bullet points, says: "► Caffeine concentrations corresponded with storm event occurrence. ► Caffeine concentrations in rivers and estuaries draining to the coast measured up to 152.2 ng/L." This means it's not a ocean-based source of caffeine. You would need to spend US$40 to see the references for the statement that "Caffeine, a biologically active drug, is recognized as a contaminant of freshwater and marine systems." Or make an interlibrary loan request and wait a few weeks.
- speedyrev 14y agoOne of the processes that strips the berry from the coffee bean can use thousands of gallons of water a day. If not treated, it is toxic. There are better ways to process coffee, but most of the poor 3rd world farmers can't afford the upgrades to the processing plants. Still no proof, but with storms flushing these toxic pools out, it's definitely possible.
- darkarmani 14y ago> Couldn't there be some naturally occurring source of ocean caffeine? I think starbucks would be doing some deep sea drilling if there was an underground reserve of caffeine.
- IanDrake 14y ago>Human waste in coffee country has unknown effect on marine life. I hate statements like this. It denies the possibility that there is no effect. If the effect is unknown, then there is no proof that it exists.
- mhurron 14y agoIf it is unknown that it has no effect, the effect that it has is unknown. 'has [an] unknown effect' does not preclude there being no effect.
- lostlogin 14y agoIt is unknown if there is any effect.
- chimeracoder 14y ago> It denies the possibility that there is no effect. "No effect" could be interpreted as the null effect, which is covered by "unknown effect".
- sliverstorm 14y agoTechnically yes, but that isn't how they mean it to be read, and that isn't how readers will read it.
- chimeracoder 14y agoIt's exactly how I read it, and it seems others too. It makes no sense to assert "there absolutely was an effect; we just don't know what it is". Unless you're a trader dealing in long straddles.
- CamperBob2 14y agoThese articles can usually be traced back to some professor or postdoc researcher whose lab got a shiny new toy with impressive specifications. Being able to detect caffeine at 45 nanograms per liter is pretty cool, but I'd say the burden of proof is on anyone who claims that such a concentration could possibly have an effect on anything except the sensors inside a FrobozzCo 8566B Mass Spectrometer. 45 ng/l = about one grain of salt in a 1000-liter tank.