It took me a second to figure out what you were referring to, but yeah, that’s a case in point.

Yes, and this lawsuit follows a whole series of other actions by the SEC. It may seem like a long time, but due process was followed.

I’m definitely not doing that. I’m pointing out that the commenter above is correct and you appear to have a misconception about what non-profit means.

Ok, it’s evident that reading papers of this sort is perhaps new-ish territory for you, but I sincerely commend your curiosity.

To whit: if you read the Results and Discussion section of Banaei, you will find at least 5 inline citations that refer to other papers that have investigated plastic microparticle interaction with intestinal cells going all the way back to 2004, and multiple other papers discussing microparticle interaction with other cell types. What this paper does is absolutely not novel. It isn’t necessarily worthless, but it is very much not new.

Per the methodological issues with Hernandez, there is a formalized process in scientific publishing for ensuring that critical discourse about a paper is presented alongside the original work. If you search for Hernandez (or any other paper) in PubMed and scroll down past the abstract, you’ll find related articles. If there are any formal comments/critiques/corrections, those will be listed first with a different subheading.

You mean 501©, and distribution of excess profit would at minimum evoke an excise tax and might cause loss of 501© status.

You should know that critical methodological issues were reported with Hernandez, viz. they failed to discriminate particle identity. A recreation of their experiment demonstrated that the vast majority/virtually all of the particles were actually soluble oligomers that were subsequently crystallized by their preparation technique, i.e. not microplastics.

Your reading of their paper is extremely generous, but I’m not sure where you get the idea that analysis of the interaction between microplastics and endothelial cells is novel; the citations in this paper alone should be enough to tell you otherwise. The sole novelty of this paper is in drawing a link between existing studies on cell interaction and real-world situations, which is evident right from the title: “Teabag-derived micro/nanoplastics as a surrogate for real-life exposure scenarios”.

There may well be further room for experimentation in this arena, but this paper falls flat. Their methodology is so far off anything that could be described as “real-world” that it is spurious to draw any subsequent conclusions.

In a sense, but clarity of language can be the difference between accurate conclusions and misrepresentation. Just on data presentation alone, formal issuance of a correction is absolutely necessary.

Following on from that is where the issues with study design and methodology come in, and in my opinion they are both so flawed as to lead to spurious conclusions.

The other major problems I see so far:

1. as mentioned previously, their brewing methodology is so different from what would be done under normal conditions/at home that comparison between the two is meaningless. A good paper should discuss these differences and explain why some conclusions can still be drawn, but this one just makes a direct comparison.

2. the authors used empty mesh sleeves from an unnamed aliexpress vendor for their samples. We have no idea whether these sleeves are in use by any tea manufacturer, we don’t know anything about how they were made, and we don’t even know whether they were intended for food usage.

3. one of the three samples produced only cellulose particles, which a) isn’t a plastic and b) is a component of plant cell walls. I don’t know the cellulose particle concentration in a kale smoothie, but I’m certain that it’s higher. And yet the authors still just report this figure alongside the others.

Ultimately, the only thing this paper demonstrates is that certain types of thin-fibre plastic will, when handled roughly, shed nanoparticles. This isn’t a new conclusion, and doesn’t provide us with anything actionable with respect to our tea drinking habits.

I’m not totally sure what you mean by “get out more or less of the dissolved particles”, but I think I understand where your confusion lies. You keep referring to quantities, i.e. mass or particle counts. Their data is reporting these things as concentrations.

It should be obvious to you that 7.14g of salt dissolved in 2ml of water will produce a highly concentrated solution (saturated, in fact), whereas the same 7.14g dissolved in 350ml of water will produce a dilute solution. The concentration of the first one is 3.57g/ml, but the concentration of the second is 0.0204g/ml.

If somebody then turns around and says that 7.14g of salt dissolved in a mug of water will produce a concentration of 3.57g/ml, it should be readily apparent that they are incorrect. That is in effect what the authors are saying by reporting their results as particles/ml and then saying that those numbers are representative of what you might expect when brewing tea under normal conditions.

Does that all make sense?

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.

I don’t know that your comparison to Facebook holds water. Firstly, Meta’s employees are spread over three divisions: Apps, Platforms/Infrastructure, and Product Services (ads, strategy etc), where Facebook itself is just one part of the Apps division. Even assuming that Facebook occupies 50% of Meta’s total workforce (likely a massive overestimate), that brings us to around 30k employees for 3billion users, or 100k users per employee. That gives you about 0.5 FTE for your instance.

More importantly though, the job of administering a mastodon instance isn’t really comparable to the job of engineering a social network, so taking a Facebook’s salary or user numbers doesn’t really give us much actionable data. We don’t know how many Meta employees are directly involved in administration of Facebook, or how much they’re compensated.

Ultimately, it’s about what your users are willing to pay. If you can persuade all 10k of your MAUs that $9/month is worth the value they get from your instance, then go ahead. However, I suspect that you’ll be lucky to get even 1/10 of that.

The previous commenter makes a worthwhile point even if their phrasing isn’t to your liking. 8 people all making 120k per year at 32 hrs/wk seems excessive for a server with less than 10,000 monthly active users.