Last month, a zoologist left a four-star review on Amazon for a tea strainer, which he had been using to sift ants. No big deal.

The review sat quietly on the site until this week, when other scientists found it, shared it and instantly started a Twitter trend.

We lay-folk have long known that scientists use common objects for strange reasons - see NASA researchers sending rubber ducks into a glacier to track ocean currents, or environmental scientists floating tampons down streams to find pollution.

But until now, we may not have understood the scope or, frankly, the grossness of the phenomenon.

We present below: #ReviewForScience, an abridged collection.

Let's just say there are worse things you can put through a tea strainer than ants.

Tea strainers and colanders are one of the most-reviewed items, having been used to drain mashed testicles, sift bones out of cat feces and for "sieving parasites out of poop."

But there are really no limits. If someone has sold it on Amazon, or maybe anywhere, a researcher has probably befouled it in the name of human knowledge.

We could probably write more about this.

Maybe a few paragraphs about how the rise of online shopping has affected academia, or whatever, but you'd probably rather just find out what PhD student Alastair Gibbons has been doing with a vibrator, so here:

You can see the entire #ReviewForScience collection here, though beware that you may never look at a blender the same way again.

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