Scientists have discovered why spilled coffee dries in that familiar ring formation:
This was the aha moment: Maybe it was the shape of the particles that were responsible for the coffee ring effect. Coffee does have particles in it, but Yunker didn’t know whether they were spherical or not.
So he did what any good scientist would do: “We went down to the building coffee machine, put 35 cents in, got a cup of coffee, went back upstairs to the microscope, put it on a slide, took a look, and, at least on the micron scale, the particles that we saw were spherical in shape,” he says.
Learn something new every day? ACCOMPLISHED.
(And it’s 12:15 a.m., so I’m counting this towards Thursday’s quota. EFFICIENCY.)
ETA: Sarah Vaughan.
