Scientists Love Coffee -It's Official: It's in the Genes

It has been said that scientists are merely devices for converting coffee into results. It's a little known fact that the Omega Chamber under the White House, to be opened only in the event of catastrophic environmental emergency, is just a vast reservoir of finest Columbian beans designed to keep any surviving scientists going long enough to solve the problem - or accelerate their evolution fast enough to adapt to the new conditions.

Some unscrupulous coffee dealers cut their product with corn, sugar or even twigs (and you thought things were bad enough with the illegal addictive drugs). These criminal caffeine counterfeiters figured without the Java-dedication of researchers at the University of Illinois, who are developing a method to detect these unwanted additions. So far studies based on the detection of Vitamin E have revealed coffees with a corn contamination of up to 10% of the total. As a bonus, this is the only time you'll ever read an article about food saying that the presence of vitamins is a bad thing.

But why bother merely guarding what nature came up with? We're SCIENTISTS, goddammit, and we can do better! That's the path a Brazilian research team has embarked on, identifying genes responsible for desirable coffee traits and how they behave in various conditions so that the best results can be guaranteed in future. In this case genetic research is playing it's role of "the selective breeding we've been doing for a while but faster and sciencier", though it's only a matter of time before we start engineering improved coffee beans with flavors not found in nature. And by flavors I mean real actual coffee flavors, not mocha-butter-hazelnut-chocolate-truffle because I wouldn't give you the trodden on beans swept from the floor of a diesel delivery truck for that syrupy muck. But I don't have to, because that's what the suppliers do (think about it - are you going to use your good beans for stuff that's going to be sugar-coated anyway?)

The researchers haven't commented on allegations that this is just the first step towards blending coffee and human DNA, creating a race of self-caffeinating super-scientists capable of researching night and day with nothing but some light sources to photosynthesise with. This is because I didn't ask them, having no wish to be 'silenced' by a hyper-kinetic venticharged assassin for blowing the whistle too early. Expect Microsoft to come out with a new XBox: Sunlamp edition to harness the new 24-hour gaming demographic created.

But sometimes you're just too busy being a kickass scientist to hit the coffee shop. That's the case in this video[link http://www.hackaday.com/2007/03/24/make-your-coffee-with-a-laser/], where scientists who are perhaps a little too playful for people with access to a two kilowatt laser (over a thousand times more than enough to explode your eyeballs) heat up instant coffee the same way Blofeld does.

Posted by Luke McKinney (Coffee addicted scientist).

Coffee contamination screening
Frankly scarily-titled paper on contamination detection
Genetically engineer better coffee
Laser heating