Peter: Cool kids learn by cheating!

It works!

In "How Children are Spoofing Covid-19 Tests with Soft Drinks", Mark Lorch (2021) mixes earthy with technical vocabulary to explain the chemistry underlying the standard Covid-19 lateral flow test (LFT) being fooled “to bunk off school”. Lorch describes the LFT kit for a quick for Covid-19 test as a paper-like strip over a pad of gold nanoparticles bound to antibodies that stick to Covid inside a plastic holder with a T(est result)-line and a C(heck)-line. Lorch explains that a test sample, usually a mouth or nasal swab that includes “all sorts of stuff in the snot and saliva”, including “other viruses and remains of your breakfast”, is mixed with a buffer solution to maintain the acidity level of human blood. The sample returns a positive result if gold nanoparticles, which appear red, are trapped by antibodies at the T-line, while all remaining gold is trapped at the C-line to confirm a successful test.  When he ran a test with Coke and orange juice, copying Tik Tok videos, Lorch reports that it returned a positive result. He argues that the drinks’ comparatively high acidity causes the antibodies at the T-line to trap the gold. As evidence, he also reports that adding buffer solution to a fake result restored the antibodies to normal, so all the gold moved on to the C-line, erasing the false positive. Praising the cleverness of their “cunning way[] to bunk off school,” Lorch encourages young readers to test his own hypothesis. 

Reference 

Lorch, M. (2021).  How children are spoofing Covid-19 tests with soft drink. BBC. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210705-how-children-are-spoofing-covid-19-tests-with-soft-drinks 

I had thought this summary would be fairly easy. It wasn't. As you can see from my planning notes, that went well, but as my Google Doc records, it took me a lot of revision to meet the word limit. At 248 words, this is version 4.