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posted by janrinok on Thursday July 23 2015, @11:18PM   Printer-friendly
from the depends-how-thirsty-you-are dept.

Tap water that has been left to sit out slowly begins to acquire an off taste. Many assume that this is because of micro-organisms. Treated water's added chlorine will take care of small communities of these little guys, but at room temperature they begin to multiply rapidly and can really get the party started. Even with clean water and a clean glass; one sip introduces a host of germs to the mix, in addition to whatever the water may have picked up by ambient dust.

But that's not what makes old water taste stale. For that we can thank carbon dioxide. After about 12 hours tap water starts to go flat as carbon dioxide in the air starts to mix with the water in the glass, lowering its pH and giving it an off taste. But it's most-likely safe to drink.
...
As for plastic water bottles that have been left out in the sun or the car, step away from the bottle, warns Dr. Kellogg Schwab, director of the Johns Hopkins University Water Institute. "A chemical called bisphenol-A, or BPA, along with other things used to manufacture plastic can leach into your water if the bottle heats up or sits in the sun," he explains. BPA, as you likely know, is a hormone disruptor has tentatively been linked to everything from heart disease to cancer. Schwab also says that plastic used for bottled water isn't meant to be washed or refilled, so use only one time and recycle. Or way better, don't buy them at all; use a refillable water bottle instead.

I like to let mine sit out until it acquires malarial mosquito larvae.


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  • (Score: 2) by lentilla on Friday July 24 2015, @06:04AM

    by lentilla (1770) on Friday July 24 2015, @06:04AM (#213045)

    Edutainment! I like it! Hadn't quite thought of it that way but I suppose there is a large element of that in all non-fiction reading. (Or purporting to be non-fiction.) At least it's better than trying to watch a documentary - where it often takes half an hour to squeeze out a single fact. We truly do live in a golden age of accessible information and arguments.

    I hope I don't give the wrong impression by providing links to Wikipedia. It's not that it's the only source I've read, it just happens to be a very convenient way of identifying "this is what I'm talking about" so that if something isn't immediately apparent to the reader, they can quickly click the link and say: "oh yeah, that".

    Of those four links I supplied (grandparent to this comment) I'd only read one of them prior to today. I dislike it when other people make unwarranted assumptions about prior knowledge (witness the recent complaints about TLAs on this forum). Oh, what's a TLA, do I hear? A Three Letter Abbreviation. Anyway, I digress. So when writing a comment I generally prefer to clarify what I mean. Wikipedia is usually a good match for that - it's not gospel but it's good enough to narrow the subject field right down.

    Many of the comments here at SoylentNews are conversational in nature. This post is an example of that. As occasionally happens that I have something specific and exact to convey, I'll be sure to use an exact link to do so. If I'm just footnoting what or who something is, a quick link will do just fine.

    TLDR: the links in my grandparent post were a reader's aide, not an indication that I overestimate Wikipedia's verisimilitude.

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