Fun for the whole family

Good morning Staker! Here’s what’s cookin’ today. What actually happens when you drink coffee; scientists discover a little black hole sun; and was King Tut in his own tomb, or squatting in someone else’s?

Let’s get into it!

Most people who drink coffee just want the caffeine stimulus, but there are so many more things that happen within the body as a result of coffee consumption. The typical bean contains hundreds of different bioactive compounds that affect plenty of areas, from the brain to the gut microbiome, and not necessarily all in a good way.

For example, the chlorogenic acids in coffee aren’t absorbed by the intestines. When they make their way to the colon, they’re consumed by gut microbes, which keeps them functioning properly in the complex web of bacteria that naturally lives in our guts.

Coffee also tends to dramatically reduce how much non-heme iron the body can take in. This is also a result of chlorogenic acids, which can bind with iron when digesting food containing it, and make it more difficult for the body to actually absorb it.

On the positive side, coffee also appears to help people clear their bowels. One study found three out ten coffee drinkers report having to….”drop the kids at the pool” shortly after consuming a cup of joe. Scientists aren’t actually certain which specific compounds in coffee cause this expedited process, but most can attest to it.

It’s almost universally known that black holes are the densest objects in existence. Their gravity is so strong, that even light can’t escape once it crosses the event horizon. However, visually speaking, that doesn’t always seem to be the case.

One way astronomers have for describing this characteristic of black holes is that they are “tremendously inefficient eaters.” In other words, they tend to burp quite a bit, and we’re talking belches at a literal galactic scale.

The thing is, “quite a bit” is a relative description in cosmic terms. Of the black holes astronomers have their eyes on, “quite a bit” could mean once every few million years, but catching them in the act would mean being able to identify the precise moment a jet ejection occurs, releasing beams of gas and light called gamma ray bursts.

Crossing the event horizon is like being digested by a black hole. These mass ejections come from outside the event horizon, and often stretch further than the galaxy a supermassive black hole lives at the center of.

These types of moments likely produced the “black hole star” rendered above, which is a distant red object from the early universe that appears to be a star, but produces energy at a rate usually only possible with black holes.

King Tutankhamun acceded to the throne at a very young age, becoming Egypt’s pharaoh at just nine years old. He ruled Egypt for only ten years, dying at 19.

The discovery of his tomb in 1922 is one of history’s greatest archeological findings, and is still producing new details even to this day.

For example, when archeologist Howard Carter made the discovery, it included over 600 artifacts buried with the young king. Since 2015, several investigations have been ongoing looking into the clues some of those artifacts may signify, possibly supporting the wild working theory that the tomb never actually belonged to King Tut himself.

The theory is that the tomb is actually much bigger than the current evidence suggests, and that it’s actually just one section of a larger burial site belonging to one of Egypt’s most beloved female figures, Queen Nefertiti.

“Although the investigation has not yet reached a final conclusion, the cumulative architectural, decorative, and geophysical indicators strongly suggest the existence of at least one further storage chamber beyond the Burial Chamber (J)’s west wall, and a royal funerary continuation beyond its north wall,” the archeological team wrote in a paper published last week in Occasional Papers of the Amarna Royal Tombs Project, led by archeologist Nicholas Reeves.

Wild and free in ‘83

From the top of the charts to new shows premiering, there was a lot going on during this week in 1983. Find out if you remember what was hot then with today’s trivia 😏 

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