A couple cups of coffee a day may help keep the blues away. A large epidemiological study of 50,000 women published yesterday in the Archives of Internal Medicine found that subjects who drink two or more cups of coffee on a daily basis were slightly less likely to be diagnosed with depression over a 10-year span compared to their less-caffeinated peers. Women who drank two to three cups of coffee were 15 percent less likely to be treated for the blues; those who drank four or more had a 20 percent lower risk.

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Those dark rings in the bottom of your cup arise from fundamental physics.

What’s the News: Some of the most mundane things in life—drinking through a straw, for instance, or washing your hands with soap—are the results of some really neat physics. Today, scientists are adding another item to that list: The ring that forms around a drying drop of coffee. A team at University of Pennsylvania has discovered that that brown ring is a result of the shape of the particles floating in your coffee—and if you squash them out a little, the coffee ring disappears.

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Go ahead, order that latte with a double shot of espresso. Then do it again and again. A new study shows that drinking up to six cups of coffee a day won’t shorten your life span, and for women that daily coffee habit may even protect against heart disease.

The Spanish researchers who conducted the study are excited about their findings, but they stop short of prescribing coffee jolts to all. “Our results suggest that long-term, regular coffee consumption does not increase the risk of death and probably has several beneficial effects on health,” said lead researcher Dr. Esther Lopez-Garcia…. Lopez-Garcia stressed that the findings may only hold true only for healthy folk. “People with any disease or condition should ask their doctor about their risk, because caffeine still has an acute effect on short-term increase of blood pressure,” she said [HealthDay News].

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