New Bacterium Lives On Caffeine 121
Kozar_The_Malignant writes "A newly-described species of bacterium, Pseudomonas putida has been found to live on pure caffeine. The little jaspers metabolize caffeine into carbon dioxide and ammonia. They were found living in a flower bed on the University of Iowa campus, not in the drain of an espresso machine as one might expect. The paper presenting the research will be presented at the American Society for Microbiology meeting in New Orleans this month where caffeine metabolism will have to contend with the traditional ethanol metabolism."
We must be related (Score:5, Funny)
But when I ingest caffeine it just makes my pee smell like coffee.
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But when I ingest caffeine it just makes my pee smell like coffee.
Unless of course its tea.
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But when I ingest caffeine it just makes my pee smell like coffee.
Diabetes???
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Nope! Diabetes free, tested recently :)
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Nope! Diabetes free, tested recently :)
Lucky you!
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The little jaspers metabolize caffeine into carbon dioxide and ammonia.
That could explain it.
Well then you need this bacteria (Score:1)
Now it will make your post-digestion/kidney-processed coffee smell like ammonia.
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WARNING! SPY DETECTED! (Score:2)
Okay, pal. Where did you come from? RIAA? MPAA? SGAE? Spit it! /. from inside. Definitely NOT a geek.
You are obviously somebody from the Other Side in an undercover job, trying to bomb
In a related note, I drink 2-3 espressos a day, just because I like the strong taste of the carefully roasted beans. And I'm not addicted at all: when I travel to non-coffee countries like England or Japan (we continental Europeans don't call that crap "coffee" but rather "mopping water"), I have no side effects at all: I just
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Um. You can get espresso in the UK. I've always assumed that "real" coffee is not about the strength, it's about the quality of the beans. You can make super strong coffee with cheap beans and it still won't taste as good as a better variety at a reasonable strength.
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Of course! One thing is a good coffee, which is dark brown, creamy, aromatic and (to my taste) with a hint of sourness, and the other is a black, bitter coffee which usually hides the lack of real aroma with a strong bitterness and smell of "toasted" more than roasted.
So, finally UKers got decent coffee? That's good news!
But... do you agree that our Anonymous Coward above is an undercover agent? No geek would claim that "Caffeine is bad" or compare it with alcohol!
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We don't get consistently good coffee, there's the typical Starbucks/Costas on every street corner which serve okay coffee. At work there used to be a guy who was really into his coffee, so I got consistently good stuff back then.
Well actually, I agree with him :p It's the reason I don't go to our local specialty coffee shop and get coffee myself - because I'd drink it all the time. I only drink coffee when someone else at work makes it, and even then I tend to drink it very slowly throughout the day rather
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God Bless America for having the Boston Tea Party and getting rid of you tea sucking b***ards as a primary source of influence for our drinks.
And fuck you, Puritans, for making so many of us complete assholes.
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If you're referring to my reference to the Puritans, you need to read more carefully.
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Of course! One thing is a good coffee, which is dark brown, creamy, aromatic and (to my taste) with a hint of sourness, and the other is a black, bitter coffee which usually hides the lack of real aroma with a strong bitterness and smell of "toasted" more than roasted.
I agree with your words, but something makes me want to protest and I'm not exactly sure what I'm protesting.
I suppose it's that "hint of sourness" thing. I like a little more than a hint, especially when there's a citrus-like quality as I used to find in most African coffees or the earthy quality that I find in a good Robusta. So why does that bother me?
As an American who really likes that sort of thing, it's really freaking hard for me to find it. It was actually easier when the US was in your "no
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You do realize that somewhere, right now, someone is having more fun than you are, right? You should try to fix that.
Also, by not drinking moderate amounts of coffee and alcohol, you are actually decreasing your lifespan by increasing your risk of prostate cancer and heart disease.
Now what, boring dude?
Hard to Find at First (Score:5, Funny)
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Word is they were pretty hard to find at first, on account of them vibrating right off the slide.
Hard to find? Don't be silly. I actually think the story is somewhat redundant. These chaps have been vibrating off the slide and finding their way into the IT department for years...
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Great (Score:2)
Re:Great (Score:5, Funny)
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Actually, if they can get these things to leave... leavings... less offensive than ammonia, this could well be a boon for decaf coffee. Washing the caffeine out without effecting anything else is apparently really difficult.
Re:Great (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Great (Score:4, Funny)
I have a hard enough time even bothering to use my bean grinder!
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Re:Great (Score:4, Insightful)
Why would you need a liquid nitrogen trap? Methylene chloride boils at 39 point something C.
Supercritical CO2 is a good solvent for decaffeination and presents no hazard of residue (even if the process gets screwed up) and better workplace safety.
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I dunno about the workplace safety bit... supercritical CO2 is pretty high pressure. Not so high as a high pressure scuba tank, but still high enough that I wouldn't want to be around a failing (or more likely improperly closed) pressure vessel.
On the plus side, though, you can use your pressure vessels to make aerogel if the decaffeination thing doesn't work out...
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100 bar is nothing to sneeze at, but employee compliance is simple and there won't be any lawsuits 20 years latter alleging some mysterious link to a laundry list of vague symptoms (or worse, a well documented link to a list of very expensive symptoms). Also a lot less EPA problems.
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Well... maybe until the EPA classifies CO2 as a regulatable pollutant.
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I would say the bulk of the liquid could be boiled off at near atmospheric pressure (if not actually atmospheric pressure) and then it's easy to condense.
To extract the remainder from the beans If you want to be quite careful not to cook them, even slightly, you could use a vacuum. I wouldn't go as low as 10 torr though unless you also intend to dehydrate the beans. Dry ice sublimates at -78C so it should do fine by itself. For an industrial process, a mild vacuum and
I'm using Wikipedia values anyway. I kn
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I have never understood the point of decaf coffee. It's not the grandest tasting beverage in the world. If you want a drink with no caffeine that tastes a little bitter and has zero calories, try one of the many uncaffeinated varieties of tea. If you want a hot beverage that tastes good, how about hot cider or hot chocolate. If you're just thirsty, drink some water.
Alright, cue the karma destruction, since I just dissed something about coffee. It's alright, I live in the Pacific Northwest, so I'm used to be
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Some of us really do enjoy the taste of a decent cup of coffee (not the over-roasted, burnt, over-extracted-yet-weak-and-bodiless crap that's currently popular from your neck of the woods). Add a little half-and-half and you've got a lovely little emulsion. I can't take caffeine too late, but decaf with dessert can be just as tasty and satisfying.
Ah, I wouldn't worry (Score:2)
Well, I don't have much experience with bacteria, but based on my experience with other life forms that live on caffeine... as Baldrick would say, "I have a cunning plan, milord."
We just need to get them hooked on powerpoint too.Then they'll spend half the day in meetings to decide
- whether the background should be #C0C0C0 or #C0C0C1,
- who's to blame for one string being 1 pixel shorter in the browser compared to some mockups done in Photoshop,
- why can't the application be ready by next week by just adding
There's also a slime mold that lives on caffeine. (Score:4, Funny)
It's called the Sales Department.
But... (Score:5, Funny)
...are they good programmers?
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Not really, but they are great at geometric expansion problems
Re:But... (Score:5, Funny)
No, but they don't need to be. This is the million-monkeys problem: I'm sure a few trillion bacteria would eventually crank out better code than the mouth-breathing jackass two cubicles over.
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No, but they don't need to be. This is the million-monkeys problem: I'm sure a few trillion bacteria would eventually crank out better code than the mouth-breathing jackass two cubicles over.
In other news, the Indian economy just imploded.
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Oh? (Score:3)
And what does its close cousin, Pseudomonas Pendejo, live on?
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And what does its close cousin, Pseudomonas Pendejo, live on?
Just a wild guess, but it's gotta be Tecate, the only Mexican beer I'd seen served in a can (not bottle) so many years back, and the only one I simply could not STAND. But I might be getting it mixed up with Pseudomonas Cabrón.
I now believe (Score:2)
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Of course you know, this means war. (Score:4, Insightful)
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Nuuuuuu! (Score:5, Insightful)
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I'm told for this kind of situation nuking it from orbit has been proved quite effective.
Not really news (Score:1)
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If they could just get the loop (Score:3)
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The only thing worse than waking up with a hangover is gradually getting one as the day goes along because you woke up still drunk.
You got that right. And of course it happens on a day when the office is going through 3 screaming crises at once, with the emphasis on SCREAMING (oooooh, my head).
Boring (Score:1)
I, for one, welcome our new microbial overlords (Score:1)
You realize that we're all going to be out of jobs, right?
The free market will decide to employ the most efficient critters at converting caffeine into CO2 and ammonia. The fact that our new overlords will skip the intermediate step of writing code / designing circuits / creating proofs / etc. will be dismissed as "not relevant to adding to shareholder value".
1. Caffeine
2. (intermediate steps skipped)
3. Waste (CO2 + ammonia)
4. Profit!
Newly described (Score:1, Offtopic)
Nitpick: it's "newly described species", not "newly-described species". A hyphen is used to separate multiple adjectives when they modify the same noun. The word "newly" is an adverb, so it's clear that it modifies the adjective "described". The hyphen is used to disambiguate: "fifteen minute presentations" could be grouped either as "fifteen (minute presentations)" or "(fifteen minute) presentations". If the latter was meant, "fifteen-minute presentations" makes that clear.
I sometimes add the hyphen myself
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pedantic-much?
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It was a clear, descriptive, polite and helpful nitpick, at least.
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A hyphen is used to separate multiple adjectives when they modify the same noun.
Nitpick: in the phrase "fifteen-minute presentations", the words fifteen and minute are not adjectives that both modify "presentations". "Fifteen-minute", as a phrase, consists of two nouns functioning as a single adjectival phrase to describe yet another noun, "presentations". In construction, this is quite similar to an ablative absolute in Latin, although the lack of case in English nouns and the corresponding use of English words as multiple parts of speech makes the situation murky. Ask a linguist. Als
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multiple parts of speech makes the situation murky. Ask a linguist. Also, "fifteen minute
WOAH, wait... Stop-Right-There, buddy: What does the player of a linguine noodle strung instrument have to do with Language?!
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Thanks for correcting me. I should not have called them adjectives.
Also, "fifteen minute presentations" is inherently ambiguous unless referring to 15 physically small presentations.
Nitpick: this phrase is ambiguous even if it's referring to 15 physically small presentations. The author's intent and their actual wording are not always the same.
Maybe if I make this message short enough, there won't be anything in it to nitpick :).
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Not very nice! (Score:3)
They shouldn't be calling coders bacteria. Plus, they forgot pizza!
Get Back! (Score:4, Funny)
Stay away from my precious!
Oblig (Score:3)
I, for one, welcome our caffiene metabolizing bacteria overlords...
better "department" (Score:5, Funny)
from the spit-it-out-you-wee-bastard department
P. putida is definitely NOT a "new species." (Score:4, Insightful)
Perpetual Percolation (Score:4, Interesting)
So how much heat can these little guys produce metabolizing caffeine? Because if it's substantial, you could feed them coffee grounds, and use the heat to power a coffee machine...
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Genius.
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old news (Score:1)
I think I "discovered" this bacterium years ago, he was named harold and worked right next to me...
Son of a bitch! (Score:2)
Well fuck, first Small Pox, then Ebola, now this? Fucking fuck. THE END IS NEAR!!!
Is it called... (Score:3, Funny)
Math (Score:3)
They've found a whole species of future mathematicians, though probably not the best. If they survived on pure amphetamines we'd be on our way towards a mathematical revolution.
Flower bed (Score:2)
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My thinking exactly.
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This is purely anecdotal but it really does seem to help the plants grow. Tea is supposed to be better but I usually don't have any left over.
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Evil Mastermind (Score:1)
TFA must be accurate (Score:1)
I had to enable Java to read it.
Unusual (Score:1)
Ah crap (Score:2)
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Or you could make a game of it. See who gets more caffeine from the mug, you or the bacteria.
Winner gets a double espresso.
EL SEWEDY ELECTRIC: A GOOD TIME TO BUY? (Score:1)
Edits (Score:2)
1) These aren't new, they've prolly been around for about as long as the coffee bean, which might make them older than us.
2) Re: Quote from summary - Someone found them. They didn't find themselves. The sentence should begin with who did the doing. We call this the subject of the sentence.
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Fairly common to put coffee grounds in a rose bed as compost. But at some colleges I wouldn't be surprised to find bacteria in the bushes that live off anything that could be spilled from a ditched paper cup or soda can.