It's Monday morning, you're heading to your job, which you moderately enjoy, in order to pay your bills and give some semblance of meaning to your life. To start the day with fervor and offer your best canned phrases to your colleagues, you depend on a substance that gives you energy and alertness: coffee.
Upon arrival, you immediately grab your company-provided mug before taking a hot shot.
Then, as you make your way to your desk, a significant portion of its contents bids you ciao, ending up on the carpet. It's the last straw, you can't take it anymore, you scream, and everyone turns around, but you care little. Exasperated, you leave to never return.
To avoid this, scientists have delved into the issue of coffee that spills too easily when walking with a cup, to find a solution to this thorny problem. It's serious business, as a team - or just one person? - from the University of Oxford explains in detail this phenomenon, then offers two solutions to keep your beverage where it should be.
How to Limit the Damage?
We must thank science every day for what it brings us. Where Louis Pasteur brought the rabies vaccine, now it's the turn of Jiwon Han, a South Korean student who theorized a method for coffee not to spill - or at least not as much - a method tested and explained by the University of Oxford.
The explanation and experiment can be found in the following video:
If you can't bother watching the video above, let us summarize here what you should do going forward to avoid spilling your coffee while walking.
The video recommends adopting a sort of crow's grip on your cup. Imagine a crow trying to hold onto something with its claws. That's how you should hold your cup with your hands. (However, this is not recommended if your cup is very hot, as you might drop the cup and end up spilling all the coffee.)
Hold the cup as you usually do, but walk backward. This minimizes your 'swings', and you should avoid spilling.
