HS Student Built a Filter That Removes 96% of Microplastics from Drinking Water

smithsonianmag.com

3 pointsakyuu3 comments

> According to her tests, her prototype successfully removed 95.52 percent of microplastics from the water and recycled 87.15 percent of the ferrofluid.

Does the remaining 13% of the ferrofluid end up in the filtered water or in the discarded microplastics? Or a mix? Ferrofluid doesn't sound like something I want to drink

Those results aren't nearly as good as a traditional reverse osmosis filter, and the system is far more complex and difficult to upkeep.

I wouldn't expect a high-school student to make something better. What's important for the project is to be able to test and document an experiment. I do expect a journalist to understand that performing well at a high-school science doesn't mean it's been scientifically evaluated, but maybe I'm just suffering from the Gell-Mann amnesia effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#%22Gell-Mann_...

This reminds me of the time a bunch of journalists thought a 13-year-old student had revolutionized solar panels, when he just misunderstood the relationship between voltage, current, and power: https://www.zdnet.com/article/why-13-year-olds-solar-power-b...

Ferrofluid in the water would be ironic.

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