>Human waste in coffee country has unknown effect on marine life.

I hate statements like this. It denies the possibility that there is no effect. If the effect is unknown, then there is no proof that it exists.

These articles can usually be traced back to some professor or postdoc researcher whose lab got a shiny new toy with impressive specifications.

Being able to detect caffeine at 45 nanograms per liter is pretty cool, but I'd say the burden of proof is on anyone who claims that such a concentration could possibly have an effect on anything except the sensors inside a FrobozzCo 8566B Mass Spectrometer.

45 ng/l = about one grain of salt in a 1000-liter tank.

Hey, that isn't nearly scary enough.

According to Wikipedia, there are

  1.94E+02	grams per mole
  6.02E+23	atoms per mole

which works out to

  3.22E-22	grams per atom

Found in the seawater were

  4.50E-08	grams per liter

which means there were

  1.40E+14	atoms per liter

Put in "national debt" units, that is 140 trillion atoms. The current U.S. national debt is only 16.5 trillion[1], so that is 8.5 times as many molecules per liter as the U.S. government owes in dollars.

[1] http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/

If it is unknown that it has no effect, the effect that it has is unknown.

'has [an] unknown effect' does not preclude there being no effect.

It is unknown if there is any effect.

> It denies the possibility that there is no effect.

"No effect" could be interpreted as the null effect, which is covered by "unknown effect".

Technically yes, but that isn't how they mean it to be read, and that isn't how readers will read it.

It's exactly how I read it, and it seems others too.

It makes no sense to assert "there absolutely was an effect; we just don't know what it is". Unless you're a trader dealing in long straddles.

I don't think the story is about caffeination, but rather caffeine as a marker of human waste. 45 nanograms per liter doesn't sound like a lot, especially when considering the short half life of caffeine.

45 nanograms per liter means about 1 cup of coffee every 6000 liters of water. This doesn't sound like a lot, but 6000 liters fit in a cube of ~1.8m - and there is a lot of water out there.

The biological half-life of caffeine (how long it takes the human body to eliminate it) is not important here; it's not about humans but the sea life; nobody knows what happens to marine life in a continuous exposure to traces of caffeine and other substances.

Wait, what?

If we assume 100 mg in a cup of coffee, we can do the math by: 1.010E^(-1)/4.510E^(-8)

which is equal to 2.22*10E^(6) or 2.22M liters of water. You're only off by a factor of 370!

Since one cubic meter is 1000 liters, you're looking at a cubic body of water that is 13 meters or ~40ft on each side.

What does "x * 10E^(y)" mean?

You'll notice that the link you provided does not actually include an example of the usage you intended it to serve as a reference for. This is probably because the usage is nonstandard, which is probably why GP asked their question.

It's reasonable to assume that "x * 10E^(y)" was meant as a notation for "x * 10^(y)" = "xEy", but many mathematical notations are overloaded. I have no way of knowing whether GP was genuinely confused, or merely trying to point out the nonstandard usage, but I prefer to believe the former.

Judging from personal experience, they'll probably get a lot more work done, but make more frequent trips to the restroom.

If 1 cup of coffee contains 150 milligrams of caffeine (http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=how+much+caffeine+in+1+...) that would take 3.3 million liters (not 6000).

Slight miscalculation: 6,000 litres fits in 6m3 not 1.8m3 (ref: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=6000+litres+in+meters+c...)

No, the grandparent was right. He's talking about how big a cube could contain 6000L, but you're calculating the volume of 6000L.

Simple way to visualize this: Think about the difference between a 4-foot square and 4 square feet. The former is a much bigger area.

Of course! Thanks :)

He said a cube of 1.8m, not 1.8m3 - he means 1.8m x 1.8m x 1.8m, making it easier to visualise :)

> considering the short half life of caffeine

But the thing is - it's 45 ng/l in the whole environment around sea organisms.

I don't know if that's a large dose or not, I'm just saying the half-life comment doesn't seem to apply in this case.

Right, we should presume that it's being replenished at the same rate it's decaying unless the measurement happened to be taken right after a big dump or something.

It is not unreasonable to claim that the fish actively pump the caffeine out of their system. In many ways fish are hermetically sealed.

So is caffeine actually easier to measure than coliform bacteria detection? It'd be cool if this resulted in better ocean water safety reports.

Can you give a value for the half-life of caffeine? I think you might be confusing its biological half-life with its half-life as it decomposes in water. From what I can gather, the latter isn't particularly short.

According to the linked-to article: "Caffeine ... might persist for up to 30 days in marine waters, study co-author Granek noted."

Ah. Serves me right for skimming.

Where is the proof that these elevated caffeine levels in the water are from humans? Couldn't there be some naturally occurring source of ocean caffeine? Caffeine producing sea weed, for example.

Also the "high" level they measured was 45 nanograms per liter of water, which is 0.000001 parts per million. The molecular weight of caffeine is 10 times that of water which means there is one caffeine molecule for ever 10 trillion water molecules. Seems pretty insignificant to me.

> Seems pretty insignificant to me.

It repeatedly says things like "effects are unknown" and "we're not yet sure about its environmental effects," he said. "But it's a very nice tracer, even if it doesn't have a large effect, because in most parts of the world, you know that this is coming from a human waste source."

Just because something seems insignificant, doesn't mean that it is.

As to the caffeine sources, this summary linked to the paper's abstract. The highlights section, with bullet points, says: "► Caffeine concentrations corresponded with storm event occurrence. ► Caffeine concentrations in rivers and estuaries draining to the coast measured up to 152.2 ng/L."

This means it's not a ocean-based source of caffeine. You would need to spend US$40 to see the references for the statement that "Caffeine, a biologically active drug, is recognized as a contaminant of freshwater and marine systems." Or make an interlibrary loan request and wait a few weeks.

> Couldn't there be some naturally occurring source of ocean caffeine?

I think starbucks would be doing some deep sea drilling if there was an underground reserve of caffeine.

One of the processes that strips the berry from the coffee bean can use thousands of gallons of water a day. If not treated, it is toxic. There are better ways to process coffee, but most of the poor 3rd world farmers can't afford the upgrades to the processing plants. Still no proof, but with storms flushing these toxic pools out, it's definitely possible.

A lot of drugs can be detected in water, e.g. prozac:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/3545684.stm

As well as spices that vary with season, cocaine, etc [0] ...

I'm curious as to how these tests are done. I'm guessing samples are drawn and then run through a IR-spectrography machine. I wonder at what depth, how close to sewage runoff, etc.

[0] http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/11/091112-drink...

IR could never detect these compounds at that low of a level.

My guess is that they are doing a extraction of water, concentrating the extracts and running a mass spec on a gas chromatographer.

That's the only way you'd be able to detect stuff at the ng or pg level.

Contraceptive hormones as well: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/jun/02/water-syst...

I'm curious to know where the highest density of Starbucks is in the world. My obvious guess is downtown Seattle or maybe Manhattan or central London. I'd love to see someone compute the metric, perhaps the highest number of Starbucks within a specific square mile or maybe the specific location on earth which has the most Starbucks within say 1 mile.

http://maps.google.com/maps?q=starbucks+in+downtown+seattle

Also, if you're caring about the density of specialty coffee in Downtown Seattle (where I am now) you would want to take other shops into account. There's a Starbucks on just about every corner, but on every other corner you'll find a Stumptown or a Vita or a Ladro or a Vivace or...

I've always wondered about the drivers for this density of coffee shop. The density seems a lot lower in most UK cities. Is it that people have small apartments? Or is it to save office space?

Neither. Most homes and offices still have coffee making equipment. It's more of a social and cultural thing. In my case, my regular barista is one of the few people in my life who never has unreasonable expectations of me :)

I'd like to find the spot in King County/Seattle area that's the farthest from espresso. I'm going to venture a guess that it's in the middle of a lake.

King County is very large and a lot of it is rural or forest service land. I know Seattle owns a lot of land in the Cedar river watershed since that is the city's water supply. I'd guess somewhere out there is the farthest spot.

Seattle might own it, but it's not part of the city.

Cursory playing around with Google Maps indicates that it is probably somewhere on the coast in Magnolia.

In India, we have Cafe Coffee Day (CCD) instead of Starbucks. I have noticed that the concentration of CCDs in certain regions of Bangalore is much higher than that of Starbucks in Manhattan (I've been to both). At some places in Bangalore you find a CCD for every hundred square meters.

Of course, you also have a whole lot more people in that area. Perhaps a better measure is stores per capita per square mile/km?

so that USA wins? :) cafes per square km would be a more interesting measure than Starbucks per km I think.

Without coffee, Washington state would be uninhabitable. I suppose leach fields and other sorts of chemical filters could prevent this and other chemical plumes. Moreover, I for one would be happy if I could retain my caffeine longer.

> Without coffee, Washington state would be uninhabitable.

What do you mean by this? I rather like Seattle and the Cascades.

It's probably a reference to the dark damp winters.

I love living in Seattle, but I remember a December trip to LA a few years ago and thought "I can't find any good coffee here, but if I lived here I might not need good coffee to keep from killing myself"

I'm from Seattle. Many, many people suffer from http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/seasonal-affective-disorder... due to the weather.

This is from almost 6 months ago.

I understand that 6 month is not a very big time for this new, but I think that this comment don't deserve so much downvotes (it's light gray now). It's not offensive and not wrong and not completely irrelevant.

I can't see how many points it has. I think that 1 or 0 could be fine, 2 or -1 are a little too much/few for my taste. But its points are now too negative. Please don't abuse the downvote button.

I understand it. This was all over the blogs 6 months ago when it was released but I'm sure there are a lot of people who missed it the first time around. Not everyone has Google Alerts setup for "caffeine" like I do. :)

In other news, this is not a headline from The Onion.