After water, tea is the world's most popular drink. Now three New York City high school students have discovered what maybe a bruing scandal because they found stuff in lots of teas that shouldn't be there. The students were guided by professional researchers as they worked their way through 70 teas and 60 urbal varieties. The material tested came from 33 companies and originated in 17 countries. The high schoolers extracted and amplified the tea DNA and then sent it to a sequencing facility. They then compared the sequences they got back with none sequences listed in the * data base maintained by the US National Library at Medicine. The junior scientists found that 4% of the straight teas contained additional plant material and more than a third of the urbal products included unlisted ingredients., such as louis blue grass and White goosefoot. Four of the urbal mixes contained relatives of parslie and seven had unlisted calmenmeal. The research was published in the Nature Journal Scientific Reports.

The effort shows that it's possible to cheaply identify food ingredients and do quality control. And all like calmameal may represent in the attempt to keep us calm about inpiredies.

Thanks for the minute. For Scientific American's 60-Second Science. I'm Cynthia Graber.