Gmail features web clips over the menu bar that you can customize and often spew some sort of advertisement. One such is for the Coffee Fool. They make the claim that fresh coffee should be a sweet drink and that bitterness and flatness are a result of the roasting process. I’ve been very curious to try it out, but the price is anywhere from 50-200% more than Starbucks, which is already expensive enough. I might cave soon, though, as I have been given scientific justification to spend money (and frankly, the thinnest pretexts will do when it comes to spending money). So boffins have concluded that the bitterness is coffee is not due to caffeine as it had been supposed, but due to roasting. It seems the Coffee Fool knows what they’re talking about.
“Battling Bitter Coffee: Chemists Identify Roasting As The Main Culprit“
On an almost completely unrelated note, Germany will be deploying a satellite to go into orbit around the moon. The goal is to create a stereoscopic view of the moon and thereby produce 3-D images. It will also capture 3-D data of the moon’s magnetic field. All this is part of a drive to go back to the moon. With W‘s call for a manned moon mission by 2020, the world must surely be seeing a critical need to not allow the US to spread its hegemony there as well. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting the world thinks the US will be taking over the moon, per se, but that early influence will lead to American dominance of the birthright of all mankind (which is itself debatable, I know).
The moon is basically a giant nugget of gold protected in the deepest cave and guarded by a pack of crazy monkeys. It’s damn hard to get at, but whoever does will be rich. The moon is loaded with Helium-3, which — if fusion does become possible — will be the fuel. So there’s a bit of a chance here and potentially worth billions. Now we just need to get fusion working…
