And if he does research on potassium, you can bet he’ll strike out in the lab’s softball game

Chuck Jackson writes:

Last night I was reading the article “The brine of the times” in the 27 September issue of Science magazine and I saw the following text:

A key contribution of the approach of Li et al. is the increased scale of experiment by five orders of magnitude compared with the bench-scale tests. Such pilot-scale demonstrations are rare in direct lithium extraction research studies and provide valuable insights into the scalability and economics of the process. In pilot tests with simulated brine containing less than 0.1% LiCl, the authors obtained lithium recovery above 80%, which is an impressive step toward real-world feasibility. (Emphasis added.)

The research study being referenced is

“Lithium extraction from brine through a decoupled and membrane-free electrochemical cell design,” ZHEN LI, HI-CHUN CHEN, LI CAO , XIAOWEI LIU , KUO-WEI HUANG , AND ZHIPING LAI H

Now, causality is always hard to identify but with (1) First Author surname being LI and (2) Third Author first name being LI—what are the chances of this author/subject connection being random? Maybe the Dennis/Dentist theory is correct.

Here’s some background on the Dennis the dentist story.

As I wrote at the time:

No big deal, we all make mistakes, but I hope the Times can run a correction of equal length to the original article, explaining that the claim about names has been shot down, and also educating readers a bit on the uncertainties of this sort of scientific finding.

I do not think they ever ran such a correction, but they did have space for these classics:

Nicholas Kristof’s column on Thursday misspelled the middle name of a Vanderbilt professor. She is Cecilia Hyunjung Mo, not Hyunjong.

An earlier version of this column misstated the location of a statue in Washington that depicts a rambunctious horse being reined in by a muscular man. The sculpture, Michael Lantz’s ‘Man Controlling Trade’ (1942), is outside the Federal Trade Commission, not the Department of Labor.

I think if you’re willing to correct the spelling of one vowel in somebody’s middle name or the location of a statue of a rambunctious horse, you should be willing to correct the erroneous statement, “Researchers find that female-named hurricanes kill about twice as many people as similar male-named hurricanes because some people underestimate them,” or various erroneous economic and education statistics.

Regarding Chuck Jackson’s question that got this post going, people have occasionally extrapolated from my last name to suggest that I do some research into colloids. I haven’t done so yet, but such a collaboration is still possible in the future.