This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are the beginnings of each of them: A spoonful of sugar? — Should one take sugar in one’s tea? Feedback is mindful of two things about this question. For one, nearly everyone, in the UK especially, considers (or pretends to consider) the […]
Not everyone uses used tea leaves to make supercapacitors. The authors of this study are among the people who do: “Eco-Friendly and High Performance Supercapacitors for Elevated Temperature Applications Using Recycled Tea Leaves,” Sanket Bhoyate, Charith K. Ranaweera, Chunyang Zhang, Tucker Morey, Megan Hyatt, Pawan K. Kahol, Madhav Ghimir, Sanjay R. Mishra, and Ram K. […]
Experts, especially British experts, both agree and disagree on the question: What is the proper way to make a cup of tea? Investigator Gary Dryfoos reminds us that there are audiovisual materials documenting some of those views. Here are a few of those materials. One might keep in mind that there is an official British […]
“Coffee, Tea, and Mood Experiments” is a featured article in the special Coffee, and Tea issue (volume 26, number 4) of the Annals of Improbable Research. If you indulge in a cup of coffee or a cup of tea, inform yourself—in a tiny and certainly iffy way—as to what you might be doing to your […]
The 1999 Ig Nobel Literature Prize was awarded to The British Standards Institution, for its six-page specification (BS-6008) of the proper way to make a cup of tea. BS-6008 is now, in the year 2020, available for sale at a price of £110.00 per copy from the British Standards Institution, which now calls itself BSI. […]
“First popularized within Halo 2 multiplayer competitive matches, teabagging is a controversial practice where the player’s avatar repeatedly crouches over a defeated player’s ‘body’ in order to simulate rubbing his or her genitals over the avatar’s body” [our hyperlink] By way of a recent essay for the academic journal Games and Culture, the first (and […]
A round of surprise appears in a glass of beer—or a glass of coffee or tea—when you shake it stirringly. Details are in this study: “Counter-Rotation in an Orbitally Shaken Glass of Beer,” Frédéric Moisy, J. Bouvard, and Wietze Herreman [pictured below], EPL [Europhysics Letters], vol. 122, no. 3, no. 34002, 2018. The authors, at Université […]
The teabag composition initiative—or, to use its even more formal name, the TeaComposition initiative—aims to measure how fast teabags decompose in different settings. “The advantages of using tea bags to study decomposition,” say the organizers, are, in their words: simple, standardized, cheap and time-efficient method uses commercially available Lipton tea bags tea bags constitute a pre […]
Britain is famous for tea and also for graphene. A recently published study combines the two. The study, called “Synergistic Effect Between Tea Polyphenols and Aluminum Flake on the Reduction of Graphene Oxide,” was written by a team of scientists in China. The publisher of the study—American Scientific Publishers—offers to sell you a copy of […]
How might a person’s desire be ‘frustrated’ by another person? Philosophers David Birks and Thomas Douglas at the University of Oxford, suggest two ways in the Journal of Value Inquiry, September 2017, using the desire for a cup of tea as an example. “Suppose that a person, call him Andrew, has a desire to drink […]