Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Another thing coffee is good for

Every week there seems to be another article with a health benefit of coffee (recently, this one about an apparently reduced rate of endometrial cancer).  But it's not all about health;  I was intrigued by the following article in which caffeine from coffee acts as a biomarker for sewage pollution, because all that coffee people are drinking results in a lot of pee, and the pee has residual caffeine in it.  So when the pee gets in the water with raw sewage, the resulting bacterial contamination, usually some kind of E. coli, can get linked to the raw sewage because of the associated caffeine.

Coffee-Drinking Provides Raw Sewage Red Flag
 
All of which is rather gross, but darn good science.  I think I'll brew another pot and then produce some biomarker.

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