Tiffany Lo

Jada Jones

Eilidh Farquhar

Coffee lovers are avoiding energy crashes by drinking a 'focus enhancing' mushroom alternative

This new coffee blend claims to provide a natural energy boost which avoids shaky side effects.

Many coffee lovers are turning to this unique blend to lessen their jitters. (Image: Getty Images )

While many of us drink a cup of coffee in the morning to help start the day or have a couple throughout the day for a wee pick me up, some of us end up regretting this decision when we are left with shaky side effects and major energy slumps.

Well many coffee lovers have now found a new blend that promises to "enhance your mind and body" without any of the miserable jitters to follow. Health and Wellness brand DIRTEA has recently been making waves for its new Arabica concoction that includes functional mushrooms.

Yes you read that right, mushrooms. DIRTEA's Mushroom Coffee has given frequent coffee drinkers their much needed kick without the looming energy slump and shaky limbs. So what does this new popular coffee actually include?

READ MORE: 'Fantastic' £28 Amazon coffee machine is 'real value for money' at near 30% off

READ MORE: Apple's iPhone 16 Pro hailed 'one of the greatest' amid £100 Amazon price slash

DIRTEA's Mushroom Coffee contains a unique blend of 100 per cent Arabica coffee beans along with 1,000mg of Lion's Mane mushroom, along with essential B vitamins, including B6, B12, Pantothenic Acid, and Folic Acid. The brand's aim is to help boost cognition, general wellbeing and support your nervous system with this coffee blend, reports the Express.

Neuroscientist and medical doctor Dr Tara Swart has endorsed the DIRTEA brand, as well as being their chief science officer. She says: "We stand for health, education and community. I have used adaptogenic mushrooms for many years and this is the brand I love on so many levels."

This blend combines arabica beans with Lion's Mane mushroom extract. (Image: DIRTEA )

Adaptogenic coffees have acquired themselves an enthusiastic fanbase as they use substances, such as herbs and mushrooms, to help your body adapt to stress and restore balance. This means you can enjoy a coffee while also benefiting your general wellbeing. This mushroom concoction also boasts up to 80 per cent less caffeine than typical drinks.

In a one-time purchase from the DIRTEA website you can get 60 servings of mushroom coffee for £38. Alternatively, you choose to sign up to a subscribe and save service which sees the price drop to £26. You will also get a free mug, jar and spoon with this deal.

With over 19,000 reviews on the DIRTEA website, many buzzing shoppers - but not from normal coffee - have left raved reviews of the product. One delighted shopper wrote: "Love the flavour of this coffee, and the fact that it offers healthy benefits is an added bonus."

If you choose to subscribe you can get a free mug, jar and spoon. (Image: DIRTEA )

Another customer added: "This is the best coffee ever, if I happen to run out of my Dirtea Coffee and have an instant shop bought coffee, the jitters I get. You notice a considerable difference." With a third saying: "I'm sharp, aware on this coffee with loads of energy, without the cons. Highly recommend."

While a fourth shopper praised: "I love it. I can have as many cups in a day as I like and don't get the jitters or a crash."

However, one shopper commented that the taste isn't amazing, writing: "The taste was something to get use to. I have now mixed it with a spoonful of regular coffee to help drink it. But I think it had helped me focus and increased my energy."

Beauty deal of the week The right hair oil can give your hair the TLC it needs, but what one to go for? One that remains a firm favourite is the Olaplex No. 7 Bonding Oil (30ml) that has been called "an essential for any hair type". It will come as no surprise to many loyal fans, as the hair firm has a long standing reputation as a go-to for dry, damaged hair. If you've been wanting to try the No.7 Bonding Oil out, then it is currently reduced on Amazon by 22 percent, going from £28 to £22. It's currently £22.40 on Lookfantastic and £28 on SpaceNK, so we'd advise taking advantage of the Amazon deal while you can. Designed to be used on damp hair, the Olaplex hair oil uses a "highly concentrated" blend of coconut-derived emollient, vitamin E and sunflower oil. Just a few drops is said to leave hair "instantly soft", while the brand claims it provides up to 125 percent more shine. Save your dry, damaged hair with this Olaplex Bonding Oil (Image: Olaplex ) It also provides a whole host of other hair benefits such as 72-hours worth of frizz control and humidity resistance and a 77 percent reduction in hair breakage. It can also protect colour vibrancy and provide up to 450ºF/232ºC heat protection, so your locks remain healthy during styling. Owing to the brand's reputation, it's no surprise that the Olaplex No.7 Bonding Oil currently has a 4.6 rating based on over 52,000 reviews from Amazon customers who have called it a "lifesaver" and "an absolute miracle" for damaged hair in need of some saving. One glowing review read: "Love, love, love this fabulous bonding oil from Olaplex! The best you can use on damaged hair! Restores & revitalisers! Can be used on damp hair before styling, or on dry hair! A true lifesaver for frazzled hair!" Purchase the Olaplex No. 7 Bonding Oil (30ml) for £22 on Amazon here.

If you want to try DIRTEA's popular mushroom coffee, you can click HERE.

Article continues below

DIRTEA isn't the only brand to be adding herbs and mushrooms to your typical drinks. You can also look at the London Nootropics range on Amazon, which products retailing at £15 for a one-time purchase. Alternatively, you can buy 60 servings of Javasu Mushroom Coffee for £36.

This new coffee blend claims to provide a natural energy boost which avoids shaky side effects.

Coffee lovers are avoiding energy crashes by drinking a 'focus enhancing' mushroom alternative

4a4c17ff98b6c333792819790db8f1c4539beac0

It's an all too familiar experience for those of us who have drank too much coffee: shaky hands, a rapid heart rate, and an underlying sense of anxiety. These side effects are often the result of consuming high levels of caffeine – hence the term caffeine "jitters". For many

Why does drinking too much coffee cause caffeine "jitters"?

Pharmacists have revealed to DailyMail.com the commonly taken drugs that could interact with coffee and other caffeinated beverages, leading to severe side effects.

I'm a pharmacist - these are the 12 meds you should NEVER take with coffee

Feeling tired and groggy in the morning may well lead you to crave a coffee boost. But is it a gift or just a loan in terms of energy?

Coffee won't give you extra energy. It'll just borrow a bit that you'll pay for later

Energy Consumers Australia CEO Lynne Gallagher says energy prices are driven by global conditions, not domestic supply conditions.

"I think there's a whole discussion about supply that's been brought into this, which always gets brought up when we're talking about prices," she told Sky News Australia.

"According to the ACCC, Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, we have enough uncontracted gas supply available to be used in electricity generation in the eastern states."

Energy prices are 'driven by global conditions, not domestic supply conditions'

Although glass has been used throughout history, its atomic structure was not proposed until the 20th century. Yet, a few mysteries remain even today.
In a seminal paper in The Journal of the American Chemical Society in 1932, physicist William H. Zachariasen first proposed that glass is composed of three-dimensional, random networks of alternate atoms of silicon and oxygen joined in long cross-linked chains.

Zachariasen's proposed structure for glass

He suggested that the basic structural unit was a tetrahedron of one silicon atom surrounded by four oxygen atoms in which the tetrahedrons shared corners.
He theorised that the network lacked the rotational symmetry and translational periodicity found in a crystal structure. But how did Zachariasen or his peers know that his radical idea was basically correct?
The first major body of evidence to support Zachariasen's hypothesis came from the application of X-ray diffraction studies. When X-ray light is shone on a substance, bright patterns appear as spots on a photographic plate.
Although this Nobel prize-winning technique developed by William and Lawrence Bragg worked brilliantly to explain the X-ray patterns from crystals, the situation for glasses remained a mystery.
Glass produced a series of dim, broad rings, very similar to those found in liquids.
At first, it was theorised that the glasses were comprised of many small, randomly orientated crystals.
However, the correct interpretation came in 1934, when the physicist B E Warren showed mathematically that a random network, such as described by Zachariasen, could precisely explain the intensity and the position of the weak broad rings observed in X-ray diffraction.
Today, the study of glasses using X-ray and neutron diffraction has matured into a vast and active field, and these nuclear techniques are routinely used to extract the so-called "pair distribution function" of disordered materials, a measure of the distribution of gaps and spacing between atoms.
In fact, it is now known that what we commonly refer to as glass, silicon dioxide (SiO2), is only one example of a very common type of "glassy" structure, generally known as amorphous materials. And it has a large family of relatives in "metallic glasses", "polymer glasses", "oxide glasses", etc.
Even today, the many fascinating structural, optical, electronic and quantum properties of the glass family continue to fascinate researchers.
Although X-ray and neutron diffraction provide a very useful measure of the glass structure, these scattering techniques are most sensitive to the distribution of spacings between atoms averaged over the entire sample (approximately 1028 atoms).
The measurements are indirect in that they do not provide a direct image of any single atom. However, in the past decade, new techniques such as scanning tunnelling microscopy and atomic probe tomography have allowed researchers to directly "photograph" the structure of glasses at the single atom level.
Researchers from the Fritz Haber Institute in Germany clarified the atomic structure in a two-dimensional model of amorphous silica using scanning tunnelling and atomic force microscopy in a paper published in Physical Review Letters in 2012.
Their evidence which was acquired using two-dimensional glass, provided important information about the structure of three-dimensional glass.
Preliminary scans revealed irregular meshes in a network as proposed by Zachariasen.
They also saw the transition from a crystal structure to an amorphous state, as shown by their experimental data in the figure below.

. Scanning tunnelling microscopy image of a SiO2 glass on a surface from Phys. Rev. Lett. 109, 106101 (2012).

The amorphous structure had each silicon atom in a plane surrounded by three oxygen atoms, as in crystalline silica. However, crystalline silica forms a regular honeycomb structure that is composed solely of hexagons in a plane.
According to their observations, silicon and oxygen atoms take turns in the individual silica layers and form a network of rings that lie next to each other.
They found that the rings assume sizes that differ greatly from rectangular rings with only four atoms through to those with nine or more atoms.
Most of the rings were hexagonal. There were fewer rings if the number of their atoms deviated from six.

So, other than windows, what is glass useful for?
It is the mechanical, electrical, chemical, optical and thermal properties of glass, as determined by its chemical composition and atomic structure, that make it a highly useful material with a myriad of applications. Certain types of glasses are even used in electronics and superconducting quantum computing.
"The structure of glassy, amorphous solids makes them challenging to understand on the theoretical level; however, they often produce excellent physical properties. My research has been looking at novel magnetic and electronic properties in amorphous materials," said Dr Julie Karel, a researcher at Monash and with the ARC Centre of Excellence in Future Low Energy Electronics, who uses X-ray, neutron and ion beam techniques to study the electronic properties of glasses.

"One of the great features of glasses is that being intrinsically disordered, they are often highly resistant against additional external disorder. For example, we've been doing experiments at the Centre for Accelerator Science and the Australian Centre of Neutron Scattering looking at ion beam irradiation effects in glasses and find that they are often more resilient their than crystalline equivalents," she added.
On a similar note, as glass has applications as a nuclear waste form to safely store radioactive materials, it is often investigated at ANSTO by spent fuel researchers.
Multiple spectroscopic and diffraction techniques were used at ANSTO in a study published in The Journal of the American Ceramic Society on a potential pyrochlore glass ceramic to contain actinide-rich radioactive waste.
The ceramic was subject to hot isostatic pressing (HIP) in an analysis that provided an improved structural understanding of the reaction interface to support the use of HIPing as a versatile hot consolidation process for the treatment of radioactive wastes.  The team of ANSTO spent fuel researchers included Dr Yingjie Zhang, Tao Wei, Alan Xu, Pranash Dyal and Dr Daniel Gregg. They concluded that the approach could be adopted to study waste form interactions under HIPing conditions in broader terms, including various waste forms and types of metallic canister materials.
More generally, often glassy structures can offer optical and electronic properties that are quite distinct from their crystalline parents. For example, a large international team of researchers used the THz/Far-Infrared, Small angle X-ray scattering, and Powder diffraction beamlines at the Australian Synchrotron in their study on glasses for metal-organic frameworks. In the study published in Science, they reported on a new class of composites fabricated by means of liquid-phase sintering of crystalline lead halide perovskites and zeolitic imidazolate framework glass matrices. The research demonstrated that industrial powder processing techniques can form high-performance composites suitable for optoelectronic devices. Instrument scientist Dr Domenic Appardoo was a co-author of the paper.
Other work on glasses from the Australian Centre for Neutron Scattering includes a large international study of a liquid-liquid phase transition in the supercooled liquid of a zirconium-copper-aluminium silver glass-forming alloy. The study contributed to a much greater understanding of the structure and phase stability of metallic liquids. Multiple neutron scattering techniques were used in the study published in Applied Physics Letters. Instrument scientist Prof Elliot Gilbert was a co-author on the paper and other similar studies on metallic liquids.
Glasses can even provide a clue into the distant past and cultural heritage of the humans who used them. Ion beam analysis techniques at the Centre for Accelerator Science were used by University of Otago researchers to determine the use and distribution of obsidian ( a naturally occurring volcanic glass) by Lapinta cultural groups. Because each source of obsidian has a unique elemental signature, the origin can be determined using Proton Induced Gamma Emission (PIGE) and Proton Induced X-ray Emission (PIXE).  In the study reported in the Bulletin of the Indo-Pacific Prehistory Association, archaeologists compared artefacts with sources of obsidian to demonstrate that there was continuous travel back and forth between distant islands thousands of years ago.

So what makes a glass behave differently from a crystal at ambient and low temperature?
A glassy state is an unusual phase of matter, and the atomic structure is due to the way it is formed.
A mixture of materials is heated at a great temperature until it becomes molten and viscous (with the ability to flow) and then cooled quickly in water (quenched).
"The atoms aren't given enough time or enough thermal energy to actually arrange into perfect ordered lattices. Instead, they get frozen into a kind of messy metastable solid," explained Dr David Cortie, an instrument scientist at ANSTO who has undertaken work on metallic glasses.
"There are some interesting glasses that form even at cold temperatures. The low-temperature properties of glasses, both structural and magnetic, are among the least understood," said Dr Cortie. "The basic situation is that the random network of atoms in a glass undergo additional atomic vibrations and quantum tunnelling at low temperature, not commonly found in crystals".

"An example of this is glassy aluminium oxide used at the spacer layer in superconducting circuits which are the basis of quantum computing, but the glass is a major source of troublesome noise and decoherence in circuit junctions".

Scanning transmission electron microscope image of glass on the surface of a crystalline aluminium particle (taken in HAADF mode). The sharp dots are the crystalline region, whereas the grey smudge is the glass, caused by the lack of columnar gaps between the glass atoms. Image courtesy of the Electron Microscopy Facility at the University of Wollongong.

Cortie and researchers from RMIT have used neutron spectroscopy to study the atomic motion in such glasses that naturally form on aluminium surfaces. Electron microscopy revealed well-defined columns in the crystalline phase but a blurry surface in the glassy phase (above).
The source of the blurry surface is the random distribution of atoms in the glass, aided by the atomic vibrations of glass atoms.
"There is plenty of evidence that the atoms in a glass are moving, undergoing additional vibrations, even at low temperature."
"The Third Law of Thermodynamics says that change in entropy of a system must go to zero in a perfect crystal at zero temperature, but this doesn't happen in glass.  This residual entropy is associated with anomalous heat capacity, even at the very lowest temperatures," explained Dr Cortie.
In a paper published in Physical Review Research in 2020, Dr Cortie and his collaborators used neutron spectroscopy to investigate mysterious low-temperature vibrations, known as boson peaks, in ultrathin samples of alumina glasses (Al2O3) with a glassy and crystal phase.
"We used modelling to predict structures over a range of temperatures and tested the predictions on experimental samples using ultra-sensitive neutron instruments."
"Inelastic neutron spectroscopy is a powerful tool to study complex glasses as it offers both energy and spatial resolution to measure picosecond dynamics".
Dr Cortie undertook the research while at the University of Wollongong, along with colleagues from the Theoretical, Computational and Quantum Physics Group at RMIT led by Professor Jared Cole. ANSTO instruments Dr Richard Mole, Dr Nicolas de Souza, Dr Gail Iles, and Dr Dehong Yu contributed to the study. They also made use of the GADI supercomputer to perform molecular dynamics simulations of the glass.
"X-ray and neutrons have revealed a lot about glasses in the past one hundred years, allowing us to build better computational models", said Dr Cortie.
"But several mysteries still remain, particularly surrounding the quantum behaviour of glasses. New experimental techniques are needed, using X-rays, electrons and neutrons. Until then, some of these mysteries will be left waiting on the next generation of young, brilliant scientists to solve."

Special thanks to Dr David Cortie for his contributions to this article.

The mechanical, electrical, chemical, optical and thermal properties of glass, as determined by its chemical composition and atomic structure, make it a highly useful material with a myriad of applications.

The Republic of Korea has been keen to demonstrate that it is in fact Asia's fourth-largest space power and ranks just behind China, Japan and India in terms of space ambitions and development.  With the launch of its first moon-bound probe, it has made it clear that although it is considered to be the world's tenth largest economy, it is one of the seven nations globally with the greatest interest in outer space. The South Korean scientific spacecraft is called Danuri, which in English means "enjoy the moon", weighs 678 kilos, is cube-shaped, measures 3.18 x 6.3 x 2.67 metres and, according to the Seoul government, cost 182 million dollars.  PHOTO/KARI - The Danuri lunar probe carries six scientific instruments, weighs 678 kilos, is cube-shaped, measures 3.18 x 6.3 x 2.67 metres and has required an investment of 182 million dollars In a way, Korea has followed in the footsteps of the United Arab Emirates, which relied on Japan and its H-IIA rocket to send its first interplanetary probe, the Al Amal Mars spacecraft, to Mars. In the Korean case, it has chosen its great ally, the United States, and Danuri's liftoff took place late on 4 August from the Cape Canaveral launch complex in Florida. A Falcon 9 vector from US tycoon Elon Musk's SpaceX company was responsible for launching it en route. The spacecraft took off on the same day that US Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi arrived in Seoul to support the Asian country in maintaining a strong deterrent against North Korea and seeking its denuclearisation. South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol, who took office on 10 May, had the opportunity to speak to Pelusi by phone, thanking him for his gesture and explaining that Danuri will serve "to boost Korea's space economy and scientific expertise".  If the probe succeeds in reaching lunar orbit, the Republic of Korea will become the seventh nation to explore the Moon in situ, as Russia, the United States, China, India, the European Space Agency and Japan have already done. But the South Korean mission is not an isolated initiative. "The first step of our national space exploration programme is the moon," says Science Minister Lee Jong-ho.  PHOTO/AP - The launch of the South Korean spacecraft into space from Florida coincided in date (4 August) with a quick visit to Seoul by the Speaker of the US House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi Hyundai and Kia to be on the moon in 2031 The president of the Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI), Professor Lee Sang-ryool, has confirmed that "there are technologies we need to improve, but we can travel and land on the moon with our own capabilities". Seoul aims to launch a lunar surface module together with a small rover by 2031. And they are already working on it. On 27 July, the car manufacturers Hyundai and Kia signed an agreement with six Korean research institutes to develop robotic technologies to equip the country's future space rover. The project is joined by Korea's extensive space business network, which manufactures satellites and even the KSLV-II Nuri launcher, which successfully completed its second successful flight into space from the Naro space centre in southern Korea on 21 October.  PHOTO/KARI - The KARI lunar exploration programme envisages the probe now launched, to be followed by a lander with a rover to investigate the soil of our natural satellite by 2030 Regarding the Danuri probe - also known as the Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter or KPLO - the Korean Ministry of Science and Telecommunications has already verified its proper operational status in orbit and confirmed that "the solar panels are generating sufficient power and all on-board devices are working properly".  It is being monitored throughout the mission by NASA's three Deep Space Network communications stations: the US station at Goldstone, California; the Australian station near Canberra; and the Spanish station located in the municipality of Robledo de Chavela, near Madrid. Korea also maintains partial contact with the probe via the large satellite dish it has built in Yeoju, Gyeonggi Province. Danuri will reach its long-awaited goal by the end of the year and not in about six days, the time it took the Apollo 11 mission in 1969 to travel nearly 400,000 kilometres. The reason is that the South Korean spacecraft does not follow a direct trajectory, which consumes a lot of energy. Instead, it flies in the direction of the Sun. It follows a so-called "lunar ballistic transfer" trajectory with low energy and fuel consumption, until it reaches the so-called Lagrange Point 1 (L1), located 1.56 million kilometres from our Blue Planet, where the Sun's attraction is balanced by the Earth's attraction. There it will slow down and be re-routed towards the Moon.  PHOTO/KARI - The probe is being tracked by NASA's three Deep Space Network communications complexes (Goldstone, Canberra and Spain's Robledo de Chávela) along with Korea's Yeoju 135 days to reach lunar orbit It is a similar path to that followed by the small American probe Capstone. Weighing 25 kilos and launched into orbit by NASA on 28 June from New Zealand, it is scheduled to reach the moon on 13 November, i.e. it will take 136 days to reach the moon. If the Danuri mission goes according to the calculations of the KARI engineers, the probe will be captured by the Moon on 16 December after 135 days, i.e. four and a half months after the start of its flight. On 31 December, it will be placed in a circular orbit at an altitude of a hundred kilometres above the lunar surface. Once it has stabilised and the six scientific instruments on board have been checked, the spacecraft will begin observing and collecting data in early January.  PHOTO/KARI -  Danuri does not follow a direct trajectory. It flies on a low-energy, low-fuel-consumption lunar ballistic transfer flight on its way to LaGrange Point 1 (L1), where it will be re-routed to the Moon One of the instruments has been provided by NASA. It is the ShadowCam camera, an evolution of the one on board the US Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter probe, launched on 18 June 2009, but about 200 times more sensitive. Its task is to map with a resolution of up to 1.7 metres per pixel the ground of the lunar regions at both poles that are always in shadow. The ShadowCam is intended to locate water ice deposits and other resources to help plan future manned missions and build sustainable bases. ShadowCam and communications are not NASA's only contribution. The Agency is providing technical assistance, navigation technologies and, in collaboration with the Korea Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute, a kind of interplanetary Internet to prevent disruption of transmissions to Earth.  PHOTO/KARI - The president of the Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI), Professor Lee Sang-ryool, says Korea needs to improve its space technologies, but can travel to and land on the moon with its own capabilities The other four instruments are a magnetometer (KMAG) to track the magnetic field between the Earth and the Moon; a gamma-ray spectrometer (KGRS) to search for spontaneous gamma-ray bursts produced by massive dying stars; a wide-angle polarimetric camera (PolCam) to analyse the properties of grains deposited on the lunar surface. For the descent mission planned for 2031, it incorporates a high-resolution camera (LUTI), which will provide images for KARI technicians to determine the most suitable landing sites.