The Coffee Cup

The universe in a cup of coffee

As people throughout the world awake, millions of them every minute perform the apparently banal act of pouring cold milk into hot coffee or tea. Those too groggy to reach for a spoon might notice upwelling billows of milk separated by small, sinking, linear dark features such as shown in panel a of the figure. The phenomenon is such a common part of our lives that even scientists—trained to be...

Engineering the perfect cup of coffee: Samuel Prescott and the sanitary vision at MIT.

From Pop-Up Cards to Coffee-Cup Caustics: The Knight's Visor

As a pedagogical exercise, we derive the shape of a particularly elegant pop-up card design, and show that it connects to a classically studied plane curve that is (among other interpretations) a caustic of a circle.

Electronic Nose for Quality Control of Colombian Coffee through the Detection of Defects in “Cup Tests”

Electronic noses (ENs), are used for many applications, but we must emphasize the importance of their application to foodstuffs like coffee. This paper presents a research study about the analysis of Colombian coffee samples for the detection and classification of defects (i.e., using "Cup Tests"), which was conducted at the Almacafé quality control laboratory in Cúcuta, Colombia. The results o...

New Safety Margins for Melanoma Surgery: Nice Possibility for Drinking of “Just That Cup of Coffee”?

BACKGROUND The American Joint Committee on Cancer (AJCC's) skin melanoma surgical treatment recommendations from 2011 are characterised by a prima facie "freedom of choice" regarding how extensive should be the excisions for melanomas with tumour thickness up to 2 mm and melanoma in situ. It is unclear why the recommended surgical security margins vary between 0.5 and 1 cm for melanoma in situ,...