Researchers came to the conclusion after studying 92 people with a broad range of java-drinking habits. Participants -- who were told they were taking part in hearing tests -- were set up with headphones and asked to press a buzzer every time they heard audio from Bing Crosby's classic "White Christmas." As a matter of fact, the only sound played into the headsets was white noise. But participants who drank at least 400 milliliters (or about 13.5 fluid ounes) of coffee per day were significantly more likely to identify Crosby's soulful croon.

"On average, low-caf subjects heard it once. But stressed coffee guzzlers buzzed three times," said Australia's Herald Sun newspaper. 

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Latte art, pouring "textured" milk into espresso to create designs -- and in some cases full drawings -- is one of the branches of the barista's discipline. We've enjoyed our milky coffees topped with hearts, roses and leaf shapes for years, but a recent smiley bear face finally got all of Salon to wonder, How does that work?

"The point is to learn to control everything at the coffee bar -- the beans, the roast, the right grind, the water, the timing, the machine -- everything. So part of that means learning how milk behaves, and how to control it," says Ken Nye, owner of Ninth Street Espresso, and the man many credit with popularizing latte art in New York City.

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The Seattle-bassed coffee company announced today that it would offer a new size of coffee in the spring: Trenta. Clocking in at a thirst-quenching 31-ounces, the Trenta will be available only for iced beverages and -- with the exception of McDonalds' 32-ounce cup -- may be the largest size of coffee offered by a national chain.

The announcement comes on the heels of other major changes for Starbucks Corp. Last Wednesday the company unveiled a new and improved logo, on its fourth since the Starbucks' founding in 1971. Dropping the words "Starbucks Coffee from the logo" and displaying more prominently the iconic siren, the redesign carries bigger implications for the company's future.

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Nine of the coffee workers died at the scene Sunday in the town of Zunil, northwest of Guatemala City, and the others were pronounced dead at nearby hospitals, said Mario de Leon, a spokesman for a local fire department.

Most of the 70 people on the truck were between 12 and 19 years old and a handful of the passengers were children.

The truck driver, who is recovering at a hospital, is in police custody after authorities smelled alcohol on his breath after the crash, De Leon said.

The truck was coming down a road known for its sharp turns when it went off road and crashed into a wall, throwing out some of the passengers, authorities said.

Fifty other coffee workers were traveling the same road in a separate truck.

Coffee is one of Guatemala's main exports.

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Those are scalding words for one of the best coffee shops in a city percolating with so many new ones that in March The New York Times decided to list the 40 "best." The irony is that until a few years ago New York couldn't compare to the Pacific Northwest -- where the specialty-coffee trade was born in the '60s -- or cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles or Chicago. In New York, drinking diner coffee was almost a badge of distinction. But now the market here for specialty espresso has grown so frenetic that even Portland's groudbreaking Stumptown and San Francisco's Blue Bottle entered the East Coast fray, suddenly turning the city into an all-star showcase of American coffee.

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Fourth-wave coffee? When, you might wonder, did espresso-making become the feminist movement? In 2003, apparently. That's the year coffee purists first adopted the "wave" concept to explain the ways in which coffee taste has improved in recent years. The concept was first proposed by Trish Skeie, of Seattle's Zoka coffee and a prominent figure in specialty coffee, in a 2003 article for the Roasters Guild's Flamekeeper magazine.  The gist: There have been three waves in coffee consumption and preparation -- and we didn't get things right until now.

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But, as an article in today's Wall Street Journal explains, these are just the latest in a long string of health side-effects that have been ascribed to many people's favorite early-morning beverage. Older studies have found links between coffee and an alarming number of very bad things -- including higher blood pressure, high heart rates, miscarriages, lower birth weight for babies,  breast lumps, bone loss, and anxiety. So how do we reconcile these findings with newer ones that tout coffee's benefits?

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I understand if you need to walk away right now to get a cup, because even just the mention of this stuff has that effect on people.

But for those still with us, imagine a short glass with a hard dose of sweetened condensed milk, the color of ivory and the texture of hot fudge. The glass wears a metal top hat, a filter with grounds and water, which dribbles in drops of thick coffee, crude-oil black and nearly as bitter. They sit, stacked in two layers, until you take a spoon and give it a turn. For a moment, the coffee and milk swirl around each other, hesitating before coming together, a phenomenon smarter people than me call sensitive chaos. You take a sip, and the sweetness hits first, full and rich. Then your mouth dries a bit, like the tide pulling back, and coffee leaves a mellow bitterness. You take another sip, and suddenly everything is right with the world.

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Even some employee perks are getting cut:

In recent months, it reduced the hours of its free cafeteria service and suspended the traditional afternoon tea in its New York office.

Now, I have had lunch at Google and I can tell you that cutting back on the hours for what was already a crowded mob scene is nothing to sneeze at. (Unless you are sneezing at the hand-ground pepper on your freshly tossed salad.) As for afternoon tea service -- I stand by my long held belief that this would be a much more civilized world, if all companies took a break for high tea (cucumber sandwiches are a right, not a privilege!) Maybe the Obama administration can do something about this.

But if this is what a rough patch at Google looks like, the company is still offering "a fantasy version of what the corporate workplace environment could be," as I wrote in "The Google Brain" a little over a year ago. Crumpet, anyone?

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As an economic indicator, that's just plain bad news. If Americans are giving up their Starbucks lattes and settling for the dregs from the office coffee machine instead, you know they're truly desperate. An impulse toward penny-pinching can be understood, but not such an abject embrace of the dark side. Coffee's important, people!

Which brings me to an even more disturbing Starbucks subplot. The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday that Starbucks' rollout of "a new, milder brew" as its primary drip coffee had "alienated a small yet vocal group of longtime patrons." Sales were up, noted the Journal, but so was consumer discontent.

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Now a self-described coffee obsessive, Weissman spent a year visiting coffee plantations around the world in search of "the perfect cup of coffee" and documented this enviable journey in a new book, "God in a Cup." Her book comes at a time when coffee is, well, hotter than ever. 2007 saw $12 billion in sales for specialty coffee -- defined by the Specialty Coffee Association of America as "the highest-quality green coffee beans roasted to their greatest flavor potential by true craftspeople and then properly brewed to well-established standards." Recent studies have shown that high coffee consumption may actually lower the risk of heart disease, and America's consumption of specialty coffee just keeps climbing. According to the 2008 National Coffee Drinking Trends Study, 17 percent of the adult population consumed a daily gourmet beverage in 2008, compared with 14 percent in 2007.

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This is causing me some distress.

I've been hanging out with this Buddha for a while. I'm not a man of great faith -- this is about as close as it gets. And let me make clear right off that I have little patience with those who claim that the Laughing Buddha is not the "real" Buddha, but merely a legendarily congenial Chinese monk of the ninth century who became associated in the popular folklore with the Maitreya Buddha, that transcendently promised bodhisattva destined to succeed the historic Sakyamuni Buddha. Let's not get bogged down in theological hairsplitting. If you are at all familiar with Chinese culture, you know whom I'm talking about: the enormously fat guy with the ear-splitting grin, often depicted with delighted children hanging off every roll of blubber. His belly is there for all to rub -- not for enlightenment, but for good luck, for fertility, for the simple joy of it.

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Americans are cutting back on their morning lattes at Starbucks.

This tidbit comes to us from Time Magazine's Justin Fox, who writes in his "Curious Capitalist blog " that during a visit to Time's corporate offices on Monday, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz said "For the first time in our history as a company, we have negative traffic this year vs. last."

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