we're doomed (part 2)

Well, after discovering that eating red meat is approximately environmentally equivalent to running over a rainforest filled with kittens in a Hummer, it saddens me to report the next avenue of our rampant destruction on Mother Earth:


Yes, indeed dear friends, it is our morning cup of coffee that silently lurks our endangered animals and turns up the thermostat in Antarctica. A 2007 study by Chapagain and Hoekstra states that an average (125 mL) cup of joe took an astounding 140 litres to produce! Annually, the world uses 110 billion cubic metres of water for the production of coffee (about 2% of the world's total water use on crops).

We here at Infiniflux are deeply saddened to hear of this, as we are very big fans of coffee and his little friend, 1,3,7-trimethyl-1H-purine-2,6(3H,7H)-dione.

Puts the few litres you save from have a shorter shower in perspective!

You can find out more information here.

(above: a delicious latté from Museo in Saskatoon)

water? on mars?

The Phoenix Mars mission is reporting that they've found conclusive evidence for water on Mars.

Their evidence? Watching the alleged chunks of ice disappear over four days.

"It must be ice," said Phoenix Principal Investigator Peter Smith of the University of Arizona, Tucson. "These little clumps completely disappearing over the course of a few days, that is perfect evidence that it's ice. There had been some question whether the bright material was salt. Salt can't do that."

Um, seriously? That's it? There's nothing else on there that could characterize water a little more spectroscopically? They went and equipped the darn thing with a twitter account but couldn't include an IR spectrometer?

Who's running this thing, anyways? Sounds like they could use a chemist or two.