A new entrepreneurial approach to that perfect cup of coffee in the morning: Coffee Joulies.That largish, metallic "coffee bean" is not just a paper weight to say how much you love coffee. Supposedly it's filled with a phase-changing substance that will both quickly cool your coffee to an ideal temperature and then keep it from cooling quite as fast after that. Though I find the reference to it being filled with a phase-changing material a little non-specific and bordering on marketing woo. I mean, water is a phase changing substance.
Some sites have said metal is in it, which is possible, though all the makers are willing to say is that it is an FDA approved substance. Remains to be seen how effective they are (compared to say, little spheres of metal that might have the same affect because they are thermally conductive: soak in the heat of the coffee to cool it to a certain temperature quickly, then retain the thermal heat therby not allowing it to cool very fast). But I do agree they are cool looking which is half the battle, so that's why I'm showing them here. Cooling looking coffee bean paper weights. Maybe they work better any other thermally conductive substance at keeping your coffee in the ideal temperature range. Maybe they don't.
My guess from reading about these is that there's a metastable phase transformation occurring at roughly ideal coffee temperature, and the decomposition of the metastable phase to the stable equilibrium phase releases heat gradual during the course of the metastable-stable phase transformation. Therefore, I also presume that is you were to put cool beans into coffee already at the ideal temperature, they would act like a large piece of metal in your coffee. I still need to work on sketching out my proposed phase diagram..
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