Notes Walton:

Even C.J. Cherryh in the Chanur books does this. They drink gfi. Gfi! To make it worse, they also drink tea, because tea is somehow a value-neutral word. There's a scene where the hani and the stsho exchange crates of tea as part of a bargain, but then they go back to the ship and drink gfi. I wonder what that is!

As she points out, people in the future aren't likely to give up coffee — not without a fight anyway. And coffee's been around since at least the 17th century, and was enough of a fixture that you get delightful things like this:

But Europeans didn't have it in the Middle Ages, although the Ethiopians did. So "if you're going to have coffee, perhaps your fantasy world ought to be more manic and caffeinated than the real middle ages." Which sounds like an alternate history fantasy I'd love to read! Top image from Shannon Wheeler's Too Much Coffee Man Opera: The Refill [Tor.Com]

Four-fifths of all respondents in the Nature poll (not just the pill-poppers) thought people should be allowed to take these pills if they wanted to.

It's interesting to compare these results with those from an annual study done by the National Coffee Association, which reports that 1 in 5 people in the U.S. drinks espresso drinks. They also have a fascinating chart, similar to the chart done for the Nature study, showing what percentage of people drank coffee the day before the survey, and breaking down the answers by age. You can see that recreational coffee use is rampant — up to 70 percent of people drank coffee within the last 24 hours in 2007.

And yet coffee is a crappier stimulant than Ritalin or Provigil, with lots of bad side-effects. So the lesson here? Scientists get the good shit, and the rest of us are left clutching a shakes-inducing mug of Starbucks. Charts via Nature and the National Coffee Association.

Poll Results: Look Who's Doping [Nature]

The machine analyzes the gas espresso gives off when heated, translating combinations of ions into subjective descriptions like "roasted, flowery, woody, toffee and acidity." Called an "electronic taster," it was created by chemical engineers at Nestle in Switzerland, and will be used as a quality control device in the coffee industry. And perhaps as an evaluation tool for a few coffee snobs (for the record, the machine only tastes ristretto pulls).

Analytical Chemistry published an article this week about the amazing machine, including a precise scientific evaluation of "coffee headspace." According to a release about the research:

The multisensory experience from drinking a cup of coffee makes it a particular challenge for flavor scientists trying to replicate these sensations on a machine. More than 1,000 substances may contribute to the complex aroma of coffee.

Coffee scientists have long been searching for instrumental approaches to complement and eventually replace human sensory profiling.

When Machine Tastes Coffee [Analytical Chemistry]