Like mushrooms, to which they are closely related, truffles are the fruiting bodies of a fungus that forms a partnership with trees, sheathing the tree roots in a net of cells known as mycorrhiza and feeding the trees water and micronutrients in exchange for sugars, which the trees make through photosynthesis.  But unlike mushrooms, which rise above the surface, open their parasols, and let wind and water spread their spores, truffles stay underground—an adaptation to dry environments.  Nestled in the earth, they have less of a risk of desiccating in a drought, but they do have a spore-dissemination challenge.  They’ve solved it brilliantly by producing some of the most extraordinary scents in biology, complex cocktails of aroma that many animals, including humans, find irresistible.  The animals dig up the truffles, eat them and spread the spores.  Rowan Jacobsen  https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/american-grown-truffle-breakthrough-180977702/ 

Rowan Jacobsen is an American author and journalist.  He is known for his writings on nature, science, sustainability, and the organoleptic experience.  His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Newsweek, Harper's Magazine, Outside, Orion, Eating Well, Forbes, Popular Science, Mother Jones, Vice, Lucky Peach, Food & Wine, Smithsonian, Scientific American, Audubon, Yankee, and elsewhere.  His work is regularly anthologized in The Best American Science & Nature Writing and Best Food Writing collections.  He has been an Alicia Patterson Foundation fellow, writing about endangered diversity on the borderlands between India, Myanmar, and China; a McGraw Center for Business Journalism Fellow, writing about the disruptive potential of plant-based proteins; and a Knight Science Journalism fellow at MIT, focusing on the environmental and evolutionary impact of synthetic biology.  He has performed with Pop-Up Magazine, lectured at Harvard and Yale, and appeared on CBS, NBC, and NPR.  He has received James Beard Awards for his book A Geography of Oysters and his Eating Well piece, "Or Not to Bee."  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rowan_Jacobsen 

The smallest in the group of Greater Sunda Islands, but with a population of 140 million people, Java is one of most populated places on the globe.  The island is located in the Malay Archipelago and is a major economic region of Indonesia.  The length from west to east is about 1,000 kilometers, with a maximum width of 192 kilometers.  The island's area is 126.5 thousand square kilometers.  In the north the island is washed by the Java Sea, in the east Bali Strait is found separating Java from the island of Bali, in the south by the Indian Ocean, and to the west is the Sunda strait separating Java from Sumatra.  Approximately half of the Java territory is covered by mountains.  The mountain belt of different eras stretches in the south, mostly composed of limestone.  More than 100 volcanoes, about 30 of which are active, rising above the low mountains.  https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/what-country-is-the-island-of-java-in.html 

Coffee has many names.  Some, such as “espresso,” and “drip” refer to how coffee is made.  Others, such as “mocha” and “cappuccino,” refer to a specific beverage made with coffee.  Still others refer to coffee’s origins and history.  “Java” falls into this third category.  During the 1600s, the Dutch introduced coffee to Southeast Asia.  They brought coffee trees to places like Bali and Sumatra, where it’s still grown today.  Another island they began planting coffee on was Java, and it’s from this island that the name “java” arose.  It’s not known specifically known how the term was first used.  The Dutch were likely the first to use the name, and they may have used it to refer to single-origin coffee from Java.  As the coffee trade grew, though, the term was adopted by more and more people throughout the world, and any specificity was lost.  Today, “java” has become a generic term for coffee and no longer refers only to coffee from the Island of Java.  Coffee continues to be grown on Java today, and much of the island’s arabica production comes from estates that were originally built by the Dutch.  In the 1880s, coffee leaf rust decimated many of the trees on the island, and producers responded by substituting arabica lots with liberica and then robusta ones.  Liberica and robusta coffees are both more resistant to leaf rust, but their traits aren’t nearly as desirable as arabica’s.  Thus, the coffees produced by these trees are usually used in lower-quality, commercial-grade coffees, not in specialty-grade coffees.  Five plantations, however, still grow coffea arabica and have decent processing facilities.  Some plantations age their coffees for up to three years, which is known as “monsooning” it.  This creates a less acidic and mellow coffee.  It mimics the flavor profile of coffees that Europeans would have enjoyed in the 1600 and 1700s, when transporting coffee by ship from Java to Europe could take years.  In 1995, a programming language called Java was released and featured a steaming cup of coffee as its icon.  Javascript was also released in 1995, and it continues to be used some today.  posted by Scott  https://driftaway.coffee/coffee-called-java/

A “cup of joe,” is one of coffee’s most common nickname—and one of its most puzzling.  The term first started appearing in print in the 1930s, with the first occurrence of it in a book coming in 1936.  Martinson Coffee has trademarked the term “cup of joe,” suggesting that the slang term comes from the company’s early years. Founded in New York in 1898 by Joe Martinson, who reportedly had a “bigger-than-life personality,” coffee may have locally been called “Joe’s coffee” or a “cup of joe.”  As the company grew, “cup of joe” could have expanded from a local nickname to a more widely used term by the 1930s.   Warhol liked to paint their cans, and, more recently, Martinson Coffee made an appearance on Mad Men in Season 2 Episode 7.  In 1914, Secretary of the Navy Josephus “Joe” Daniels banned alcohol from all U.S. Navy ships.  As this was close to the start of World War I, many young men would soon find themselves aboard a ship where the strongest drink available was coffee, or a “cup of joe.”  Those who argue against this theory often point out that this ban would have had little practical impact, because alcohol wasn’t widely available on U.S. Navy ships at the time.  When boarding dry ships, though, men who were used to going to the local bar or having a drink at home would have felt the ban’s effects.  Referring to coffee as a “cup of joe” would be one way to voice dissent and disapprovement without directly criticizing the Secretary of the Navy.  This theory doesn’t account for the twenty-year gap between Daniels’ ban and the rise of “cup of joe” in the 1930s.  The term, however, may have fallen out of favor in the 1920s when sailors returned home, only to reappear during Prohibition in the 1930s.  Linguists sometimes argue that Joe could be a shortened version of Jamoke.  Jamoke, which was a common nickname for coffee in the 1930s, was a combination of mocha and java.  Since joe refers to an average man, “the average joe,” “cup of joe” could simply be a reference to an ordinary person’s drink.  Regardless of whether this is the true origin of “cup of joe,” the term may have been kept alive by “joes,” or average guys, following World War II.  As diners popped up in the 1940s and 50s, working men who ate their daily breakfast at these restaurants might have been served “cups of joe.”  All we know for sure is that the first recorded occurrences of “cup of joe” come from the 1930s, and the nickname is here to stay.  In fact, it’s become much more popular since the 1980s.  posted by Scott  https://driftaway.coffee/why-is-coffee-called-a-cup-of-joe/

As the athletes finished marching into the stadium for the closing ceremony of the 32nd Summer Olympics on Sunday night, August 8, 2021, the announcer asked for a big round of applause.  But there simply weren’t enough people in the stands to make much noise.  And the flashiest component of the ceremony, a formation of the five Olympic rings by tiny points of light, was invisible live in the stadium.  The magic of its special effects played only on large screens and to television audiences.  There were upsets:  The U.S. women’s soccer team fell to Canada in a semifinal; Jun Mizutani and Mima Ito won Japan’s first gold medal in table tennis over the Chinese world champions.  Naomi Osaka, after lighting the Olympic cauldron for Japan, was eliminated in the third round of her tennis tournament, denying the host country a potential gold medal moment it had dearly hoped for.  There were history-making triumphs:  Allyson Felix surpassed Carl Lewis as the most decorated American Olympian in track and field, and Eliud Kipchoge of Kenya successfully defended his gold medal in the men’s marathon.  And who could resist the British diver Tom Daley, who was often spotted knitting in the stands?  Outside the stadium before the ceremony on Sunday, Ryogo Saita, 45, who was walking with his 7-year-old son, said they had enjoyed watching on television as Yuto Horigome captured skateboarding’s first gold medal for Japan.  Motoko Rich https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/08/sports/olympics/tokyo-olympics-closing-ceremony.html 

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2401  August 9, 2021