Coffee technology has definitely come a long way.

We now have that little cardboard thing that goes around the disposable cup so you can hold a cup of hot coffee without discomfort. (It actually has a name: the zarf, and one Jay Sorenson is said to have invented it in 1993 and he holds a patent on it under the trademark Java Jacket. Now multiple companies make them.)

Berry Plastics, a company based in Evansville, Ind., that manufactures cold-drink cups for fast-food vendors, including McDonald’s and Starbucks (they’re the ones who created those clear plastic cups with the dome tops for Frappuccinos), recently got into the hot-drink business by developing a “fully recyclable thermal management packaging solution.” In other words, a cup.

But not just any cup. This one — called Versalite, with 20 patents pending, and currently being tested in several markets — is a disposable cup that insulates the liquid to keep hot coffee from cooling but also to keep the cup from feeling hot to the touch. “We’ve known for a long time that there’s been a need for a better insulating cup,” said Jon Rich, president and chief executive of Berry Plastics. (Incidentally, the Versalite cup performs the same function for cold drinks.)

Not to mention the variety of insulated, metal refillable travel mugs, with any number of push-button, sliding openings from which to sip a hot or cold brew.

But all of this means we are even more lackadaisical about the potentially scalding liquid we carry. We nonchalantly sip coffee over babies, while pushing them in strollers (and stow them in the holders intended for bottles and sippy cups). We jostle one another on crowded subways and buses while clutching our coffee cups. We take them to class, carry them through stores, in libraries. Museums seem to be one of the few places that forbid them.

Sure, warnings, then and now, are plastered all over cups and tops: “Careful, the beverage you are about to enjoy is extremely hot,” says the Starbucks cup. “Caution Contents Hot,” says the lid. “Caution Handle with Care I’m Hot,” says the McDonald’s cup.

Nevertheless, an average of 80 people a year are hospitalized for coffee and tea scaldings at the William Randolph Hearst Burn Center at New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center, said Dr. Robert W. Yurt, the chief of the division of burns, critical care and trauma. Seventy percent of them were children under 6 years old, he said, though the majority of those accidents occurred at home.