splinter

Good point. This journal was just delisted from Clarivate because of integrity violations as well.

They report their findings as particles/ml, not particles/teabag. It should be obvious to you, as a scientist, that the particles/ml evolved given 1 teabag in 350ml of water will be massively different from the particles evolved with 1 teabag per 2ml of water.

So have I, and I understand why they would have chosen this approach. My issue isn’t their bench technique per se, it’s in their calling equivalence to tea brewing at home and articulating conclusions based on that.

Your objection to my describing it as “blending” is fair. However, it would absolutely not be plain swirling. With such a low ratio of liquid to teabags the physical agitation will be quite significant. Most people do not have multiple teabags in their teapot all colliding with and abrading each other while steeping.

However, the biggest cause for retraction is their failure to report accurate volumetric ratios. They used 2ml water per teabag and then reported their findings as particles/ml. It should be immediately obvious that this cannot be equated to the particles/ml that would have been derived from using 350ml per teabag, and yet they never make that conversion. I’m not going to speculate as to whether this was a result of intent to mislead or a simple mistake, but it utterly obliterates their talking point of “billions of particles”.

Yeah, just don’t put your teabag in a blender.

I mean nothing about the methodology is even close to representing normal tea brewing behavior.

For starters, a typical cup of tea is around 300-350ml, not 2ml and certainly not 1, so the low end is already down to 23,371 particles even before accounting for the brewing technique.

Secondly, nobody holds their tea at an active boil while stirring it at 750 rpm. That’s virtually blending it. There isn’t a meaningful way to compare that to typical tea brewing behavior but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that it produced 10,000x more particles.

No it doesn’t. This study is unscientific garbage and should be retracted.

Their “simulation” of making tea involved 300 teabags boiled in 600ml of water at 95 C while being stirred at 750rpm for an unspecified amount of time. They then took counts using undiluted samples of that liquid.

It isn’t clear why they chose such an absurd methodology, but it is absolutely spurious to draw conclusions from this about teabags used under normal conditions.

Why don’t you tell us about what happened on June 4th, 1989?

It’s almost too absurd to believe.

There’s a conversation to be had about microplastic contamination, but this study feels and sounds like bad faith argument.

This study is unscientific garbage and should be retracted.

Their “simulation” of making tea involved 300 teabags boiled in 600ml of water at 95 C while being stirred at 750rpm for an unspecified amount of time. They then took counts using undiluted samples of that liquid.

It isn’t clear why they chose such an absurd methodology, but it is absolutely spurious to draw conclusions from this about teabags used under normal conditions.

This study is such bullshit. They took 300 teabags and boiled them in 600ml of water while stirring at 750rpm for an unspecified amount of time, and claim their method to be an accurate simulation of making a cup of tea.

Why are you building a straw man? I made no claim about the truth or falsity of what he said; just that you shouldn’t believe it from him.

The source of this information is Ronny Jackson, who claimed that Trump’s cognitive and cardiac health were both “excellent”. He was also demoted by the Navy for drinking and taking Ambien while on duty.

Nothing he says should be believed without additional confirmation.