the blog is the message

Dear Internet. Is my coffee habit causing harm to water critters? I’m asking because I’m quite caffeinated. Also I come from a culture of persistent guilt-seeking and misery. XOXO, Enrico

Internet says:

In their 2001 study…Sawyer and Muscatine also tested a variety of pharmaceutical products, one of which being caffeine, for their effects on bleaching in the Hawaiian reef coral Pocillopora damicornis and the sea anemone Aiptasia pulchella. They proved that, at concentrations of 25mM, bleaching does occur in living coral. This occurs because caffeine degrades proteins in the host cells of the cnidarians, and thus affects their adhesion to their algal symbionts. 

Whither the dolphins and mermen?

Dear Internet: How many English words are nouns? I’m asking because of an iPhone game and the delusion that I can use this information to formulate a winning strategy. XOXO, Enrico

Internet says:

The Second Edition of the 20-volume  Oxford English Dictionary contains full entries for 171,476 words in current use, and 47,156 obsolete words. To this may be added around 9,500 derivative words included as subentries. Over half of these words are nouns, about a quarter adjectives, and about a seventh verbs; the rest is made up of exclamations, conjunctions, prepositions, suffixes, etc. And these figures don’t take account of entries with senses for different word classes (such as noun and adjective).