Dorkus Malorkus

The Joy of Tech comic… laughter is the best tech support.:

Yay! I love me some coffee! I just read this story, and while I’m not a BIG coffee drinker, it’s nice to know that something I’m doing is actually good for me.

Coffee is among the most widely consumed beverages in the world, and Dr. Coughlin says that the preponderance of scientific evidence – some by the panelists – suggests that moderate coffee consumption (3-5 cups per day) may be associated with reduced risk of certain disease conditions, such as Parkinson’s disease. Some research in neuropharamacology suggests that one cup of coffee can halve the risk of Parkinson’s disease. Other studies have found it reduces the risk of Alzheimer’s disease, kidney stones, gallstones, depression and even suicide.

Huh. Pretty decent list of stuff I’m safe from. There’s a bit of discussion of how it helps prevent type 2 diabetes in the rest of the article, too.

What I found interesting is the last bit of this paragraph, talking about how America shunned tea. I mean, I knew about the tea party, but I didn’t realize there was any kind of long-term impact to tea here. Makes perfect sense; I just hadn’t considered it.

Dr. Lenore Arab, a nutritional epidemiologist in the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, notes that the first coffee controversy dates back 430 years when in 1570 some monks petitioned the pope to condemn this drink, so popular among Muslims. Pope Clement VIII, liking how it kept the monks from falling sleep during mass, purportedly blessed it instead. The rest, including the United States’ wholesale conversion to coffee following the Boston Tea Party, is history.

Wired News: Test Tube Meat Nears Dinner Table
By Lakshmi Sandhana| Also by this reporter
02:00 AM Jun, 21, 2006

What if the next burger you ate was created in a warm, nutrient-enriched soup swirling within a bioreactor?

Edible, lab-grown ground chuck that smells and tastes just like the real thing might take a place next to Quorn at supermarkets in just a few years, thanks to some determined meat researchers. Scientists routinely grow small quantities of muscle cells in petri dishes for experiments, but now for the first time a concentrated effort is under way to mass-produce meat in this manner.

You know, this kind of freaked me out at first, but when I think about it, this could go a long way to helping end starvation. As long as the food produced could be done more efficiently than raising an entire cow, this could actually be viable. When I think about how much land & feed a farmer needs to raise a cow, it doesn’t seem too far off. Let’s keep our fingers crossed :)