| Coffee is essential to human life, but at OSU Astronomy Department, coffee is also an important contributor to science. OSU's daily coffees seeds research across boundaries, and in this talk I will discuss two research directions that I work on resulting from OSU's astro-ph coffee discussions. The first idea, "Protecting Life in the Milky Way: Metals Keep the GRBs Away" formulates a hypothesis that gamma-ray bursts can only explode if the metallicity of the progenitor star is low. The second idea, "A Survey About Nothing: Monitoring a Million Supergiants for Failed Supernovae" examines how we could verify that all massive stars do indeed explode as core-collapse supernovae. |