I guess with Raman I can see this being misidentified but I do testing with FTIR at my job, although not often for microplastics and we often detect olefins and stearates and they don't seem to get confused. I didn't realize there were stearates on nitrile gloves, we'll need to be more careful of that. We are always weary of protein contamination from people, or cellulose/nylon from clothing.
"The researchers used air samplers which are fitted with a metal substrate. Air passes through the sampler, and particles from the atmosphere deposit onto the substrate. Then, using light-based spectroscopy, the researchers are able to determine what kind of particles are found on the substrate.
Clough prepared the substrates while wearing nitrile gloves, which is recommended by the guidance of literature in the microplastics field. But when she examined the substrates to estimate how many microplastics she captured, the results were many thousands of times greater than what she expected to find."
------------------
The very first thing that should have been done is to run results for a substrate that hadn't been placed in the sampler. You need to know what a zero result looks like just to characterize your setup. Why didn't they do this?
I'm amazed that wasn't taken into account! Many years ago, in the final year of my Biology degree, I did a paid summer internship at an Evolutionary Biology lab here in Spain, assisting in a project where they were researching relationships between metal ion accumulation (mostly zinc) and certain SNPs (≈"gene varieties"). A lot of my work was in slicing tiny fragments of deep-frozen human livers and kidneys in a biosafety cabinet over dry ice.
The reason I bring this up is because the researchers had taken the essential precaution of providing me with a ceramic knife to do the cutting (and platic pliers), to eliminate the risk of contaminating the samples with metal from ordinary cutting implements.
That some research on microplatics did not take into account the absolutely mental amount of single-use plastic that is involved in biological research, particularly gloves of all things, boggles the mind.
You found a paper saying that contamination is possible. That doesn’t mean that most of these plastic studies are doing the necessary controls, let alone the (almost impossible) task of preventing the contamination in a laboratory setting where nanomolar detection levels are used to make broad claims.
Are more “controls” what is necessary here? The problem wasn’t plastic contamination, it was the presence of stearates. Distinguishing between stearates and microplastics sounds like a classification problem, not a control problem.
There is practically universal recognition among microplastics researchers that contamination is possible and that strong quality controls are needed, and to be transparent and reproducible, they have a habit of documenting their methodology. Many papers and discussions suggest avoiding all plastics as part of the methodology, e.g. “Do’s and don’ts of microplastic research: a comprehensive guide” https://www.oaepublish.com/articles/wecn.2023.61
Another thing to consider is that papers generally compare against baseline/control samples, and overestimating microplastics in baseline samples may lead to a lower ratio of reported microplastics in the test samples, not higher.
Spiritual equivalent of a life sciences forum discovering memory safety, one person who wrote code for a bit saying they wrote a memory bug in C once, then someone clutching pearls about why programmers irresponsibly write memory unsafe code given it has a global impact.
Been here 16 years, it's always an adventure seeing whether stuff like this falls into:
A) polite restrained interest
B) Science journalism bad
C) Can you believe no one else knows what they're doing.
(A) almost never happens, has to avoid being top 10 on front page and/or be early morning/late night for North America and Europe. (i.e. most of the audience)
(B) is reserved for physics and math.
(C) is default leftover.
Weekends are horrible because you'll get a "harshin' the vibe" penalty if you push back at all. People will pick at your link but not the main one and treat you like you're argumentative. (i.e. 'you're taking things too seriously' but a thoughtful person's version)
>>That some research on microplatics did not take into account the absolutely mental amount of single-use plastic that is involved in biological research, particularly gloves of all things, boggles the mind
What boggles the mind is you commenting on an article you clearly did not read...stating something that is not there...
Interestingly, contamination of the forensic equipment was considered early on already. However, due to the geographic area of the findings and initial negative control tests using fresh swabs, they ruled it out.
That's incredible. Though the effect of this will be claims that microplastics don't exist while no one in that case claimed that murders didn't happen. Happy to have learned about an interesting historical oddity either way.
I don't think anyone will claim microplastics don't exist, but people will definitely be skeptical of articles about how many there, and where they're found.
At worst, I'd expect to see people disregarding the threat, not disregarding the presence of the microplastics themselves.
I'm not sure if they have established a threat. I thought it was mostly hypothesised or very locally specific harms.
On the other hand I suspect much of the real science on environmental plastic might avoid the term microplastic since it seems to have a meaning that flows to whatever can make the scariest headline today. I have seen the size range to qualify run from microscopic up to a couple of millimetres. Volumes, quantities, or location stated without regard to individual particle size. I'm relatively certain that they have not discovered 1mm particles inside red blood cells.
Even what counts as a plastic seems to be an easy way of adding vagueness, I saw one table that seemed to count cellulose as a plastic, which makes sense if you are thinking about properties of the material, but unsurprisingly easy to come across that it's not really worth going looking for it.
Funnily, I believe the glove mandates for food prep are actually anti-hygiene.
Unlike bare skin, you can't really feel when your gloves are contaminated. So you are less likely to replace gloves when you should. With bare hands, you can feel the raw chicken juices on you, so it's pretty natural to want to wash your hands right after handling the raw chicken.
Gloves are important in medicine, but that's with proper use where doctors and nurses put on new gloves for every patient. That doesn't always happen.
> So you are less likely to replace gloves when you should.
To the contrary. You take off and throw out your gloves every time you finish doing something with raw meat. It's procedure. It's habit.
You're never relying on "feel" to determine whether there are "raw chicken juices on you". Using "feel" is not reliable.
I don't know why you think food service workers aren't constantly putting on new gloves, but doctors and nurses are. Like, if you're cutting up chicken for an hour you're not, but if you're moving from chicken to veggies you absolutely are.
> To the contrary. You take off and throw out your gloves every time you finish doing something with raw meat. It's procedure. It's habit.
You are supposed to. I've seen plenty of fast food places where the gloves stay on between jobs.
I'm sure there are upscale places that are better on this point.
> You're never relying on "feel" to determine whether there are "raw chicken juices on you". Using "feel" is not reliable.
If you were just working with raw chicken, that slimy feeling on your skin is a pretty good motivator for most people to immediately wash their hands. It's more than just procedure or habit, your hands feel dirty and you want to wash that off.
> I don't know why you think food service workers aren't constantly putting on new gloves, but doctors and nurses are. Like, if you're cutting up chicken for an hour you're not, but if you're moving from chicken to veggies you absolutely are.
You absolutely are supposed to. But there's a gap in what you are supposed to do vs what actually happens in practice. Especially if you get a penny pinching boss that doesn't like wasting money on gloves.
That doesn't happen so much in medicine because the consequences are much higher. But for food? Not uncommon. There are more than a few restaurants with open kitchens that I've had to stop eating at because employees could be seen handling a bunch of things with the same set of gloves on.
It also does not help that food is often a mad rush.
Yes but most people find it icky and would complain, especially if it's visible behind the counter. Customer is king... I can also imagine it helps with legal liability, "but we were so careful, we even mandated gloves!"
Sushi chefs spend years learning the correct feel of the fish - when it's warm enough, when it's slimy. Japanese are taken aback when they are forced to wear gloves for "safety", which at least in that case is entirely counter productive.
“ Stearates are salts, or soap-like particles. Manufacturers coat disposable gloves with stearates to make them easier to peel from the molds used to form them. But stearates are also chemically very similar to some microplastics, according to the researchers, and can lead to false positives when researchers are looking for microplastic pollution.”
Stearates aren’t microplastics. Maybe we need to be concerned with stearate pollution too.
It is true that there is not currently conclusive proof that micro plastics are a significant risk to human health. However, this is the same line the tobacco industry used for decades even though they knew different.
And indeed there is not currently conclusive proof that WiFi is a significant risk to human health. However, this is the same line the tobacco industry used for decades even though they knew different.
Because it’s an inverted claim of falsification it works for literally anything (I cannot prove that X will absolutely not hurt you), but you get pilloried if you put something in the blank that the herd happens to support.
We’ve reached the absurd point where all sides of the political spectrum have sacred cows, and an exceedingly poor understanding of scientific reasoning, and all sides also try to dunk on the others by claiming scientific authority.
Is there any specific evidence that they are a risk to human health?
I mean, I get the instinct that foreign-entity can't exactly be good for me, but the same instinct applied to GMOs, and as far as I know organic foods have never yielded any sort of statistically visible health impacts.
Plastics earn their keep in general by being non-reactive and 'durable', so it's not entirely shocking if they can pass through (or hang around inside) the body without engaging in a lot of biochemical activity.
I get your point that plastics are relatively inert and may not cause noticeable harm (depending on quantity?), but I think it'd be wise to be cautious. See for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastic#Bisphenol_A_(BPA) .
I'd also consider plastic, and their additives, to be a lot bigger and longer lasting unknown than GMOs.
Yeah, they gum up cellular workings. Kind of like how macro plastics will gum up turtle stomaches.
I have seen zero evidence that they are bad in very small quantities, but the dose can make the poison and they are out there in increasingly alarming quantities.
Many negative health effects have been associated with microplastics and related chemicals. Not sure if there's yet anything causative, but I think it's probably a matter of time and there's lots of research to be done. I'd bet the health effect of microplastics (or anything that human body isn't used to) is more likely to be negative than not.
I think any time a new material starts to meaningfully accumulate in our bodies, our food sources, our oceans, etc, we should at least go with caution. The default stance should be caution, not fearlessness.
The problem isn't just the plastics themselves. Plastics are chemical "sponges" that will soak up pollutants over time from the environment (brominated fire retardants, bisphenols, PBCs, pesticides, phthalates, heavy metals, etc) and deliver them in a concentrated dose into the body.
Even if plastics of all sizes are 100% biologically inert, they're still a Trojan Horse for other toxins.
>Roughly 50% of indoor dust is composed of microplastics, so it's not like it's uncommon.
I highly doubt that. Soil, skin and pollen are usually the big ones. Hairs depending one how you count dust, but eliminating hair like fibres would also eliminate most of the sources of plastic, unless you allow really large particle sizes.
[edit] Checking research. The highest claim I found was 39% of fibres (in household dust, Japan). but that seemed to be per particle not by volume.
Synthetic fibers from clothes are microplastics, and clothes shed lots of fibers. Not to mention all the upholstered furniture, carpet, rugs, drapes, bags, etc.
The non-trivial part isn't contamination per se, it's that the contaminant is chemically and spectroscopically similar enough to evade standard discrimination
Stearates aren’t microplastic plastics, though, they’re just similar enough under a microscope and in some chemical analyses. Without knowing which stearates glove manufacturers use (or what exactly it is about microplastics that is harmful), it’s difficult to to say whether the stearates will have the same harmful effects.
> To be honest, after reading some of these microplastics papers I'm starting to suspect most of them are bullshit. Plastics are everywhere in a modern lab and rarely do these papers have proper controls, which I suspect would show that there is a baseline level of microplastic contamination in labs that is unavoidable. Petri dishes, pipettes, microplates, EVERYTHING is plastic, packaged in plastic, and cleaned using plastic tools, all by people wearing tons of synthetic fibers.
> We went through this same nonsense when genetic sequencers first became available until people got it into their heads that DNA contamination was everywhere and that we had to be really careful with sample collection and statistical methods. [1]
I haven't really read the studies but shouldn't they have negative controls to negate these effects? Wouldn't that let the author's correct for a baseline contamination level in the lab?
That was the difficulty with DNA: how do you make that control if everything is contaminated and minor variations in protocol (like wafting your hands over the samples one too many times) changes the baseline?
It took years to figure out proper methods and many subfields have their own adjusted procedures and sometimes even statistical models. At least with DNA you could denature it very effectively, I’m not sure how they’re going to figure out the contamination issue with microplastics.
I have worked at a sequencing center before. DNA contamination is easier to mitigate because the lab disposables aren't made out of what you are testing. Disposables are almost always plastic and tend to have minimal DNA contamination. Environmental DNA contamination is largely mitigated with PCR hoods and careful protocols/practices. However, these procedures don't mitigate DNA contamination at the collection level, which is likely where the statistical models you mentioned help.
I can't imagine wafting your hands over the tubes would change the plastic amounts substantially compared to whatever negative controls the papers used. But again, I am not an expert on this kind of analytical chemistry. I always worry more about batch effects. But it does seem like microplastics are becoming the new microbiome.
That has happened many times in scientific research. The aforementioned fad in DNA sequencing was one such case where tons of papers before proper methods were developed are entirely useless, essentially just garbage data. Another case is fMRI studies before the dead salmon experiment.
Not even that! This study doesn't even say contamination is causing overestimation. It says that it's possible.
But as mentioned elsewhere in the thread, everyone knows that it's possible and take measure to mitigate it.
A paper that said those mitigations were insufficient or empirically found not to work would be interesting. A paper saying "you should mitigate this" is... not very interesting.
> Not even that! This study doesn't even say contamination is causing overestimation. It says that it's possible.
From the article:
> They found that on average, the gloves imparted about 2,000 false positives per millimeter squared area.
I dunno, that seems like a lot of false positives. Doesn’t that strongly imply that overestimation would be a pretty likely outcome here? Sounds like a completely sterile 1mm^2 area would raise a ton of false positives because of just the gloves.
The way you mitigate this is by using negative samples. Basically blank swabs/tubes/whatever that don't have the substance you're testing in it, but that is handled the same way.
Then the tested result is Actual Sample Result - Negative Sample Result.
So you'd expect a microplastic sample to have 2,000 plus N per mm^2, and N is the result of your test.
> Plastics are everywhere in a modern lab and rarely do these papers have proper controls, which I suspect would show that there is a baseline level of microplastic contamination in labs that is unavoidable. Petri dishes, pipettes, microplates, EVERYTHING is plastic, packaged in plastic, and cleaned using plastic tools, all by people wearing tons of synthetic fibers.
Maybe so, but plastics are also everywhere in our daily lives, including on the food we eat and in the clothes we wear. As we speak I just took some eggs out of a plastic carton, unwrapped some cheese from plastic wrap, and got oatmeal out of a plastic bag. The socks and pants I'm wearing are made of polyester.
If plastics cause contamination in a lab, would you not also expect similar contamination outside of the lab?
> That’s not to say that there is no microplastics pollution, the U-M researchers are quick to say.
>
> “We may be overestimating microplastics, but there should be none. There’s still a lot out there, and that’s the problem,”
shouldn't you be particularly attentive to your bias then? an article came out that _seems_ to confirm your previous belief that you arrive at without really testing? like everyone itt that is looking like the comments of an steven crowder comment section in a post about climate change
> That’s not to say that there is no microplastics pollution, the U-M researchers are quick to say.
>
> “We may be overestimating microplastics, but there should be none. There’s still a lot out there, and that’s the problem,”
From the study in the OP you cannot derive that current studies on microplastics are not valid. The headline framing that scientists have been measuring their own gloves, is science journalism doing what it does best...
Stearates are water soluble soaps, so any study using standard wet chemistry extraction, and that is most of them, washes them away before analysis even begins. Stearates also cant mimic polystyrene, PET, PVC, nylon, or any of the dozens of other polymers routinely found in environmental and human tissue samples.
Didnt they use for newest studies to detect microplastic in placentas I think only non plastic omitting alternative gloves and material. Can't recall there it was specifically mentioned in a worldclass ARTE docu about microplastics maybe some ARTE Ultras here can recall.
this feels like such a weird oversight in such a controlled environment: "oh my bad it was the gloves!"
I wonder in how many other studies this happened?
> The authors acknowledge funding from the College of Literature, Science, and Arts at the University of Michigan. R. L. P. was supported by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship (NSF-GRFP) DGE-2241144. M. E. C. was partially supported by the University of Michigan Rackham Graduate School through a merit and predoctoral fellowship. The authors would like to acknowledge the professors and students of the Mapping, Measuring, and Modeling Microplastics in the Atmosphere of Michigan team for their support and helpful discussions. The authors thank Jennifer Connor, Curtis Refior, Amy Pashak, Megan Phillips, Josh Hubbard, Bill Joyce, and David Lee for their community partnership. The authors would also like to thank former Dean Anne Curzan from the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts at the University of Michigan for funding this work through the “Meet the Moment” grant program. The authors acknowledge technical support from the Michigan Center for Materials Characterization.
Is there anything wrong here? Not sure I understood your comment
> The authors acknowledge funding from the College of Literature, Science, and Arts at the University of Michigan. R. L. P. was supported by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship (NSF-GRFP) DGE-2241144. M. E. C. was partially supported by the University of Michigan Rackham Graduate School through a merit and predoctoral fellowship.
In the acknowledgements section. However, after reviewing it, I’m not sure what or who I should be looking for, so I’m not entirely sure what the OP is hinting at.
At first glance, nothing appears suspicious, though I should note that I’m not familiar with any of the authors and haven’t looked into them further.
So the problem is these particles are literally flying off the gloves of the scientists wearing them to the point it's interfering with the experiment and so... it's less of a problem?
No, the gloves leave stearates (not plastic, but similar looking particles) residue on contact. So there are not literally micro plastics flying off the gloves. Read the article.
It's not microplastics coming from the gloves. It's particles of the powder used to coat the gloves and keep them from sticking. Different composition, but similar and easily mistaken.
If you read the article you'd find that what they are finding are not microplastics - they're stearates[1]
These are soap-like chemicals used as mould release agents on gloves, but what also means are chemically similar to plastics when analyzed by some techniques and under a microscope will spontaneously form micelle-structures which look very similar to microplastics (you can't exactly get in there and poke them).
Yes? Most people don’t live their entire lives in a lab wearing nitrile gloves, so there’s an argument to be made that the concentration of microplastics found in that setting is not reflective of everyday life.
So, not that microplastics don’t exist, but that they don’t exist to the same degree as in a lab environment.
I wouldn't be surprised if e.g. all these paper-thin synthetic (plastic) disposable parts and fabrics used in labs shed microplastics way more than e.g. synthetic fabrics designed to be survive a machine wash a few dozen times, or upholstery meant to withstand tens of thousands of sitting cycles, nevermind solid plastics (e.g. reusable food containers, furniture surfaces).
If you the read article, you would see it explains that what they release are not microplastics. They are instead a soap used to get them to unstick from their mold in production.
That's a relief. Now I can stop worrying about microplastics. Just like the environment - we don't hear much about it any more, so they must have sorted that out too. Didn't they? Did they?
Carl Sagan was right all along. Always question science, never trust these so called experts, do your own assessment, research and thinking. This must be another global climate change scam.
It is partially correct. Except make sure you have the necessary skills to question the science. Intuition in these things are quite misleading. Don't start questioning cancer reports just because you don't feel sick.If you really don't trust it, get a relevant medical degree or take second opinions from those who are really qualified and not some quacks. Otherwise you would just end up dead.
The problem with your claim that the plebs are incapable of research because they don't have equipment and are dumb is the wholesale erosion of belief in institutions after the COVID "vaccine" situation
I assume you are expert in some domain. How would you feel if someone who is not familiar with your domain comes in and start questioning your expert judgment? Even in your domain probably being an expert means having access and expertise of equipments. Without that I cannot imagine having expertise to judge what is correct and what is wrong for that domain.
I guarantee you Carl Sagan was not telling you to dismiss experts and he very much understood climate change was real. He literally testified before Congress on it, likely decades before you were even born.
It is generally bad practice to so drastically twist somebody’s words to make them say the opposite of what they’re saying. Carl Sagan would not agree with you.
Doesn't have to be one or the other. Trust, but verify? Experts make mistakes, professional equipment can be mishandled. Don't take anybodies word, look at the evidence for yourself.
This is a very scientific way of thinking. It's only gotten a bad rap on account of people using it to attack others' research and then(crucially) failing to perform their own.
> Don't take anybodies word, look at the evidence for yourself.
Please nobody listen to his person. There is nothing scientific about ignoring the experts to instead behold the opinions of the uninformed.
The world is too large, too complex, and too nuanced for the layman's opinion to be worth much. When someone is unqualified treat their opinion as equal to every other unqualified persons opinion. Include your own in that assessment. Be honest, what qualifications do you have that make your assessment of the evidence more valid than any other random street person's in the given field? It's very likely the answer is "none". So lend your own opinion the level of respect it has earned. Be honest with yourself about what that level is.
"There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'”
― Isaac Asimov
True, trust but verify and start questioning things. Science is now more politicized more than ever by politicians. COVID vaccines are not even tested. I didn't said this. Pfizer and Moderna CEO said this in EU parliament hearing.
Lol, the COVID vaccines went through some of the largest randomized controlled trials ever conducted and had some of the best safety and efficacy results ever seen.
You might have heard that it wasn't tested for reducing transmission, i.e. whether the vaccines make it less likely that an infected, vaccinated person would transmit the virus to someone else... Which it wasn't, because uhhh... how would you?
They tested it for safety, reduction in symptomatic infection rate and reduction in infection severity.
You should set aside your conclusions for a bit and take an earnest effort at learning some of the details of this stuff if you want to "do your own research" etc. It is clear you are misunderstanding some pretty fundamental things that are actually easily understandable if you approach them with honest curiosity!
You can literally look up the trial designs and they just say right on them exactly what they're testing for and how they're doing it.
But science is about doing your own research! The idea is that science results are based on evidence that is published in serious [1] peer review [2] journals.
At some time you realize you can't repeat all the test at home, because it would be full of mice and transgenic plants and a huge particle collider and ... Also, there are a lot of very hard topics. So you must trust the system, but not too much.
* Big pharma wants to sell drugs and get money.
* The FDA wants to cover they ass and get money.
* Journalist want to publish bleeding stories and get money.
[There is also an optimistic version where all of them want the best for humanity.]
All of them together are making a quite good job, and you can go to the pharmacy at the corner and be quite confident that you will get the cure for a lot of illness with a low risk. In some threads people ask for most tests, in some threads people ask for faster approval. It's a hard trade off, and I'm happy I don't have to make the decision [3].
In 2020 there was a lot of misinformation in both directions. From politicians to youtubers, form individual crackpots to professors in the university. In many cases you realize they may not even understand the difference between a virus and a bacteria, in other cases they say that the "control group" is an unrelated bunch of guys in another city.
Science is about doing your own research, but doing your own research is super hard. As a rule of thumb, if the FDA and the European equivalent agree, it's probably ok [4], but cross your fingers just in case.
[1] Whatever "serious" mean. It's a hard question.
[2] And real "peer review", not a comment section in a web page.
[4] Do you trust the contractor+regulations that installed the elevator at your building? It's another trade off of as cheap as possible and enough regulations to avoid appearing in the front page of all newspapers everyday.
IIRC they have a 95% reduction in hospitalization rate, measured in a double blind human trial. [Compare that with the vector virus and inactivated virus vaccines, that have like a 65% reduction in hospitalization rate, measured in a double blind human trial.]
We have more data on COVID vaccines that nearly every drug in existence.
My wife was one of the first pregnant women to get the vaccine (outside of trials) because she’s an ER doctor, and she’s had regular follow-up surveys from the CDC for years.
Clough prepared the substrates while wearing nitrile gloves, which is recommended by the guidance of literature in the microplastics field. But when she examined the substrates to estimate how many microplastics she captured, the results were many thousands of times greater than what she expected to find."
------------------
The very first thing that should have been done is to run results for a substrate that hadn't been placed in the sampler. You need to know what a zero result looks like just to characterize your setup. Why didn't they do this?
The reason I bring this up is because the researchers had taken the essential precaution of providing me with a ceramic knife to do the cutting (and platic pliers), to eliminate the risk of contaminating the samples with metal from ordinary cutting implements.
That some research on microplatics did not take into account the absolutely mental amount of single-use plastic that is involved in biological research, particularly gloves of all things, boggles the mind.
This was taken into account: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47563392
There is practically universal recognition among microplastics researchers that contamination is possible and that strong quality controls are needed, and to be transparent and reproducible, they have a habit of documenting their methodology. Many papers and discussions suggest avoiding all plastics as part of the methodology, e.g. “Do’s and don’ts of microplastic research: a comprehensive guide” https://www.oaepublish.com/articles/wecn.2023.61
Another thing to consider is that papers generally compare against baseline/control samples, and overestimating microplastics in baseline samples may lead to a lower ratio of reported microplastics in the test samples, not higher.
"I have unique insight as a non-expert that all experts miss and the entire field is blind to" -> usually nonsense
"I think in this specific instance academically qualified people are missing something that's obvious to me" -> often true.
Been here 16 years, it's always an adventure seeing whether stuff like this falls into:
A) polite restrained interest
B) Science journalism bad
C) Can you believe no one else knows what they're doing.
(A) almost never happens, has to avoid being top 10 on front page and/or be early morning/late night for North America and Europe. (i.e. most of the audience)
(B) is reserved for physics and math.
(C) is default leftover.
Weekends are horrible because you'll get a "harshin' the vibe" penalty if you push back at all. People will pick at your link but not the main one and treat you like you're argumentative. (i.e. 'you're taking things too seriously' but a thoughtful person's version)
Agreed. While I didn’t anticipate this myself, nor would have likely figured it out myself, I also don’t expect my claims to influence global policy.
The scientists who failed to realize this do expect that, so the standards we expect from them need to be higher in accordance with that.
What boggles the mind is you commenting on an article you clearly did not read...stating something that is not there...
The Bay Harbor Butcheress[0] :)
[0]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/butcheress (at First I made it as a joke but turns out that butcheress is a real term, indeed)
There is a “case files” podcast on it that I found quite good.
https://casefilepodcast.com/case-178-the-woman-without-a-fac...
At worst, I'd expect to see people disregarding the threat, not disregarding the presence of the microplastics themselves.
On the other hand I suspect much of the real science on environmental plastic might avoid the term microplastic since it seems to have a meaning that flows to whatever can make the scariest headline today. I have seen the size range to qualify run from microscopic up to a couple of millimetres. Volumes, quantities, or location stated without regard to individual particle size. I'm relatively certain that they have not discovered 1mm particles inside red blood cells.
Even what counts as a plastic seems to be an easy way of adding vagueness, I saw one table that seemed to count cellulose as a plastic, which makes sense if you are thinking about properties of the material, but unsurprisingly easy to come across that it's not really worth going looking for it.
Unlike bare skin, you can't really feel when your gloves are contaminated. So you are less likely to replace gloves when you should. With bare hands, you can feel the raw chicken juices on you, so it's pretty natural to want to wash your hands right after handling the raw chicken.
Gloves are important in medicine, but that's with proper use where doctors and nurses put on new gloves for every patient. That doesn't always happen.
To the contrary. You take off and throw out your gloves every time you finish doing something with raw meat. It's procedure. It's habit.
You're never relying on "feel" to determine whether there are "raw chicken juices on you". Using "feel" is not reliable.
I don't know why you think food service workers aren't constantly putting on new gloves, but doctors and nurses are. Like, if you're cutting up chicken for an hour you're not, but if you're moving from chicken to veggies you absolutely are.
I've seen enough absent-minded nose wipes on the back of gloves at Chipotle-style establishments to be pretty OK with this take.
And that's where people are watching.
You are supposed to. I've seen plenty of fast food places where the gloves stay on between jobs.
I'm sure there are upscale places that are better on this point.
> You're never relying on "feel" to determine whether there are "raw chicken juices on you". Using "feel" is not reliable.
If you were just working with raw chicken, that slimy feeling on your skin is a pretty good motivator for most people to immediately wash their hands. It's more than just procedure or habit, your hands feel dirty and you want to wash that off.
> I don't know why you think food service workers aren't constantly putting on new gloves, but doctors and nurses are. Like, if you're cutting up chicken for an hour you're not, but if you're moving from chicken to veggies you absolutely are.
You absolutely are supposed to. But there's a gap in what you are supposed to do vs what actually happens in practice. Especially if you get a penny pinching boss that doesn't like wasting money on gloves.
That doesn't happen so much in medicine because the consequences are much higher. But for food? Not uncommon. There are more than a few restaurants with open kitchens that I've had to stop eating at because employees could be seen handling a bunch of things with the same set of gloves on.
It also does not help that food is often a mad rush.
And it's true that you would get cleaner food prep if you used gloves properly. However, that requires a lot of gloves getting thrown away.
I’ve never seen for example sushi portrayed with anything but bare hands
“ Stearates are salts, or soap-like particles. Manufacturers coat disposable gloves with stearates to make them easier to peel from the molds used to form them. But stearates are also chemically very similar to some microplastics, according to the researchers, and can lead to false positives when researchers are looking for microplastic pollution.”
Stearates aren’t microplastics. Maybe we need to be concerned with stearate pollution too.
We’ve reached the absurd point where all sides of the political spectrum have sacred cows, and an exceedingly poor understanding of scientific reasoning, and all sides also try to dunk on the others by claiming scientific authority.
I mean, I get the instinct that foreign-entity can't exactly be good for me, but the same instinct applied to GMOs, and as far as I know organic foods have never yielded any sort of statistically visible health impacts.
Plastics earn their keep in general by being non-reactive and 'durable', so it's not entirely shocking if they can pass through (or hang around inside) the body without engaging in a lot of biochemical activity.
I'd also consider plastic, and their additives, to be a lot bigger and longer lasting unknown than GMOs.
I have seen zero evidence that they are bad in very small quantities, but the dose can make the poison and they are out there in increasingly alarming quantities.
More like flippancy, even hubris.
The approach you advocate is essentially the EU's precautionary principle. [1]
[1] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/EN/legal-content/summary/the-preca...
Even if plastics of all sizes are 100% biologically inert, they're still a Trojan Horse for other toxins.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030438942...
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Verla-Wirnkor-2/publica...
Roughly 50% of indoor dust is composed of microplastics, so it's not like it's uncommon.
I highly doubt that. Soil, skin and pollen are usually the big ones. Hairs depending one how you count dust, but eliminating hair like fibres would also eliminate most of the sources of plastic, unless you allow really large particle sizes.
[edit] Checking research. The highest claim I found was 39% of fibres (in household dust, Japan). but that seemed to be per particle not by volume.
Genuine question: we used to simply wash our hands well before preparing food.
At what point did the wearing of disposable gloves become "better"?
> To be honest, after reading some of these microplastics papers I'm starting to suspect most of them are bullshit. Plastics are everywhere in a modern lab and rarely do these papers have proper controls, which I suspect would show that there is a baseline level of microplastic contamination in labs that is unavoidable. Petri dishes, pipettes, microplates, EVERYTHING is plastic, packaged in plastic, and cleaned using plastic tools, all by people wearing tons of synthetic fibers.
> We went through this same nonsense when genetic sequencers first became available until people got it into their heads that DNA contamination was everywhere and that we had to be really careful with sample collection and statistical methods. [1]
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40681390
It took years to figure out proper methods and many subfields have their own adjusted procedures and sometimes even statistical models. At least with DNA you could denature it very effectively, I’m not sure how they’re going to figure out the contamination issue with microplastics.
I can't imagine wafting your hands over the tubes would change the plastic amounts substantially compared to whatever negative controls the papers used. But again, I am not an expert on this kind of analytical chemistry. I always worry more about batch effects. But it does seem like microplastics are becoming the new microbiome.
But as mentioned elsewhere in the thread, everyone knows that it's possible and take measure to mitigate it.
A paper that said those mitigations were insufficient or empirically found not to work would be interesting. A paper saying "you should mitigate this" is... not very interesting.
From the article:
> They found that on average, the gloves imparted about 2,000 false positives per millimeter squared area.
I dunno, that seems like a lot of false positives. Doesn’t that strongly imply that overestimation would be a pretty likely outcome here? Sounds like a completely sterile 1mm^2 area would raise a ton of false positives because of just the gloves.
Then the tested result is Actual Sample Result - Negative Sample Result.
So you'd expect a microplastic sample to have 2,000 plus N per mm^2, and N is the result of your test.
Maybe so, but plastics are also everywhere in our daily lives, including on the food we eat and in the clothes we wear. As we speak I just took some eggs out of a plastic carton, unwrapped some cheese from plastic wrap, and got oatmeal out of a plastic bag. The socks and pants I'm wearing are made of polyester.
If plastics cause contamination in a lab, would you not also expect similar contamination outside of the lab?
> That’s not to say that there is no microplastics pollution, the U-M researchers are quick to say. > > “We may be overestimating microplastics, but there should be none. There’s still a lot out there, and that’s the problem,”
Keeping things meticulously clean on the microscopic level is a complicated task. One of the many reasons why so few EUV chip fabs even exist.
"When Good Intentions Go Bad — False Positive Microplastic Detection Caused by Disposable Gloves" - https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.0c03742
From the study in the OP you cannot derive that current studies on microplastics are not valid. The headline framing that scientists have been measuring their own gloves, is science journalism doing what it does best...
Stearates are water soluble soaps, so any study using standard wet chemistry extraction, and that is most of them, washes them away before analysis even begins. Stearates also cant mimic polystyrene, PET, PVC, nylon, or any of the dozens of other polymers routinely found in environmental and human tissue samples.
Nothing to see here.
Why was the study funded through the humanities department?
Is there anything wrong here? Not sure I understood your comment
> The authors acknowledge funding from the College of Literature, Science, and Arts at the University of Michigan. R. L. P. was supported by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship (NSF-GRFP) DGE-2241144. M. E. C. was partially supported by the University of Michigan Rackham Graduate School through a merit and predoctoral fellowship.
At first glance, nothing appears suspicious, though I should note that I’m not familiar with any of the authors and haven’t looked into them further.
If you're around plastic a lot you're ingesting a lot and if you're not, you're not.
So the conclusion would be that plastics "sheds" and you should avoid it in packaging, kitchen utensils, etc
These are soap-like chemicals used as mould release agents on gloves, but what also means are chemically similar to plastics when analyzed by some techniques and under a microscope will spontaneously form micelle-structures which look very similar to microplastics (you can't exactly get in there and poke them).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stearic_acid
Now why would anyone do that when the headline already supports their uninformed opinion?
So, not that microplastics don’t exist, but that they don’t exist to the same degree as in a lab environment.
The COVID vaccine is a triumph of human ingenuity and we should all feel incredibly proud it exists. It was the moon landing of our time.
More broadly, vaccines have probably saved more human lives than any other medical technology in history.
It is generally bad practice to so drastically twist somebody’s words to make them say the opposite of what they’re saying. Carl Sagan would not agree with you.
Yeah, and my primitive home-grown analysis then carries the same weight as those from experts with professional equipment? Oh come on...
This is a very scientific way of thinking. It's only gotten a bad rap on account of people using it to attack others' research and then(crucially) failing to perform their own.
Please nobody listen to his person. There is nothing scientific about ignoring the experts to instead behold the opinions of the uninformed.
The world is too large, too complex, and too nuanced for the layman's opinion to be worth much. When someone is unqualified treat their opinion as equal to every other unqualified persons opinion. Include your own in that assessment. Be honest, what qualifications do you have that make your assessment of the evidence more valid than any other random street person's in the given field? It's very likely the answer is "none". So lend your own opinion the level of respect it has earned. Be honest with yourself about what that level is.
"There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'” ― Isaac Asimov
Still false
https://www.rmit.edu.au/news/factlab-meta/viral-pfizer--admi...
You might have heard that it wasn't tested for reducing transmission, i.e. whether the vaccines make it less likely that an infected, vaccinated person would transmit the virus to someone else... Which it wasn't, because uhhh... how would you?
They tested it for safety, reduction in symptomatic infection rate and reduction in infection severity.
You should set aside your conclusions for a bit and take an earnest effort at learning some of the details of this stuff if you want to "do your own research" etc. It is clear you are misunderstanding some pretty fundamental things that are actually easily understandable if you approach them with honest curiosity!
You can literally look up the trial designs and they just say right on them exactly what they're testing for and how they're doing it.
At some time you realize you can't repeat all the test at home, because it would be full of mice and transgenic plants and a huge particle collider and ... Also, there are a lot of very hard topics. So you must trust the system, but not too much.
* Big pharma wants to sell drugs and get money.
* The FDA wants to cover they ass and get money.
* Journalist want to publish bleeding stories and get money.
[There is also an optimistic version where all of them want the best for humanity.]
All of them together are making a quite good job, and you can go to the pharmacy at the corner and be quite confident that you will get the cure for a lot of illness with a low risk. In some threads people ask for most tests, in some threads people ask for faster approval. It's a hard trade off, and I'm happy I don't have to make the decision [3].
In 2020 there was a lot of misinformation in both directions. From politicians to youtubers, form individual crackpots to professors in the university. In many cases you realize they may not even understand the difference between a virus and a bacteria, in other cases they say that the "control group" is an unrelated bunch of guys in another city.
Science is about doing your own research, but doing your own research is super hard. As a rule of thumb, if the FDA and the European equivalent agree, it's probably ok [4], but cross your fingers just in case.
[1] Whatever "serious" mean. It's a hard question.
[2] And real "peer review", not a comment section in a web page.
[3] Somewhat related https://www.fortressofdoors.com/four-magic-words/
[4] Do you trust the contractor+regulations that installed the elevator at your building? It's another trade off of as cheap as possible and enough regulations to avoid appearing in the front page of all newspapers everyday.
Do you have a link to the exact quote?
IIRC they have a 95% reduction in hospitalization rate, measured in a double blind human trial. [Compare that with the vector virus and inactivated virus vaccines, that have like a 65% reduction in hospitalization rate, measured in a double blind human trial.]
My wife was one of the first pregnant women to get the vaccine (outside of trials) because she’s an ER doctor, and she’s had regular follow-up surveys from the CDC for years.