A cup of coffee each morning may wake you up, but a new study suggests caffeine might hinder your short-term recall of certain words.

Caffeine made it harder for people to find a word that they already knew – the “tip-of-the-tongue” phenomenon.

An ugly paradox of the 21st century is that some of our elegant symbols of modernity — smartphones, laptops and digital cameras — are built from minerals that seem to be fueling mass slaughter and rape in Congo. With throngs waiting in lines in the last few days to buy the latest iPhone, I’m thinking: What if we could harness that desperation for new technologies to the desperate need to curb the killing in central Africa?