Latte Talk

Most of us guzzle down coffee, tea, or those unsettling little vitamin shots to get our brain engines revving in the morning. Maybe we even continue to partake in caffeine-related activity throughout the day to keep our energy and attention levels where we feel they should be. But have you ever wished that you could more efficiently manage your intake of your legal stimulant of choice? Like, time your doses just right so that you maintain an optimum level of alertness? Well, now you can. There is, in fact, an app for that. 

The Caffeine Zone app was developed for iOS by two doctors at Penn State University. Possibly unsatisfied with gauging their caffeine levels intuitively, Frank E. Ritter and Kuo-Chuan Yeh decided to hit their habit with some science. After delving through some peer-reviewed studies on the drug, they determined that the optimal caffeine level for mental alertness and feeling generally awesome falls between 200 and 400 milligrams. While everyone metabolizes the stuff a little bit differently, the way it acts upon the body and brain is pretty well understood. Drink a cup of coffee and you'll hit prime caffeinated status within about an hour. Your body will then work to get rid of it at a rate of one half-life every five hours.

With the app, you'll be able to visualize your own caffeine levels with handy, science-y charts and graphs. Simply tell your phone when you consume a caffeinated beverage and what kind, then track your buzz's progress throughout the day. It'll tell you how much you need to drink to stay in the optimal alertness zone and it'll also warn you when you're about to drink so much that it'll interfere with your sleep schedule. So if you find your habit has been keeping you up after hours, check your intake against the Caffeine Zone app to make sure you're not overstimulating yourself too late in the day.

The scientists behind the app recommend that caffeine users start their days with one large dose, like a big hot latte, then taper off their drinking rates as the day goes on. If you're a strict coffee drinker, you might want to consider brewing weaker and weaker cups as the hours tick away. Tea-friendly users could go from coffee (or yerba mate) to black to green, a pattern I actually picked up on intuitively before I'd even heard of the Caffeine Zone. It makes for a nice slow burn all day, plus you get all the health benefits of all three drinks. Those who are strict energy drink users should probably just consume less of their poison of choice anyway. 

If we're to believe the Dunkin' Donuts marketing slogan, all of America is already powered by coffee. If only that were as true as it felt. While many of us may get most of our morning boost from the good old grounds, America itself still runs on nasty, earth-destroying sludge. Those trucks that transport your beans to your local grocery store burn up gas on a daily basis, and chances are the electricity that powers your coffee maker isn't even sourced from an environmentally friendly place. Most of our power is not so green. But what if we could get actual--not just metaphorical--energy from the same coffee we drink each morning?

A new kind of technology might just make that possible. Green Mountain Roaster, one of the biggest suppliers of the bean, has adopted a process originally developed by NASA to power lunar bases. It's apparently possible to break down plant matter into something called "syngas": a type of fuel molecularly similar to natural gas which can also be burned to reap electricity and heat. The fuel is even efficient enough to power vehicles.

All you need to do to create syngas is heat your materials to just under 600 degrees fahrenheit in a vacuum. That will give you a dry powder that's chock full of energy. Both the residual grounds and the paper filters from brewing coffee could theoretically be transformed into syngas. The only problem is that creating the stuff carries some major risks. The powder could explode spontaneously while lying around in storage, which is bad news for a lot of reasons. Until we develop a way to safely contain and transport the stuff, it's not likely that it'll catch on as the next great source of energy. 

But if we did find a way to make these natural gases safer, we could extract clean-burning energy from all sorts of waste, not just the kind you get from mass coffee brewing. All the paper and plant matter that would otherwise go to the dumpster could be used to power our vehicles and homes. Of course, we probably wouldn't need much more bio-waste than the stuff Starbucks throws out on a daily basis. Coffeeshops of the world could first power our citizens and then power their workplaces. America could actually run on Dunkin like they claim. Let's hope they add a little truth to that advertising and keep developing biomass technologies.