14 Surprising Facts About Caffeine, Explained by Science
1. This is what caffeine, the chemical, "looks" like. Image Credit: Beautiful Brainiacs The shape of caffeine is similar to an important molecule called "adenosine" that regulates brain function (pictured below). Caffeine "mimics" adenosine and binds to the same targets in the brain. Image Credit: Wikipedia 2. Caffeine looks like this when viewed from an electron microscope. Via: Annie Cavanagh and David McCarthy Caffeine naturally forms tiny crystals, about 0.0016 inch in size. This picture won a science photography award in 2012 for creatively showing an "everyday thing from a different, at first unrecognizable, perspective." 3. These are the best times to drink coffee. Image Credit: I Love Coffee That's because we're all guided by a 24-hour biological cycle, known as the circadian clock . When you first wake up your brain is already flooded with cortisol, a natural chemical that helps to keep