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.
> single-use plastic that is involved in biological research
The samples were not contaminated by plastic in the gloves. Latex gloves don't contain plastic, they're made from natural rubber. Nitrile gloves also don't contain plastic, although they're very similar to plastic.
The contamination that this study found wasn't microplastic contamination. The gloves weren't adding microplastics. The gloves were adding stearates, which aren't plastic, but look like microplastic in many of the methods for measuring microplastics.
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.
Many papers in this field are missing obvious controls, but you’re correct that controls alone are insufficient to solve this problem.
When you are taking measurements at the detection limit of any molecule that is widespread in the environment, you are going to have a difficult time of distinguishing signal from background. This requires sampling and replication and rigorous application of statistical inference.
> Another thing to consider is that papers generally compare against baseline/control samples,
Right, that’s what a control is.
> and overestimating microplastics in baseline samples may lead to a lower ratio of reported microplastics in the test samples, not higher.
There’s no such thing as “overestimating in baseline samples”, unless you’re just doing a different measurement entirely.
What you’re trying to say is that if there’s a chemical everywhere, the prevalence makes it harder to claim that small measurement differences in the “treatment” arm are significant. This is a feature, not a bug.
You’re still bringing up different issues than this article we are commenting on.
> There’s no such thing as “overestimating in baseline samples”
What do you mean? Contamination and mis-measurement of control samples is a thing that actually happens all the time, and invalidates experiments when discovered.
> What you’re trying to say is that if there’s a chemical everywhere, the prevalence makes it harder to claim that small measurement differences in the “treatment” arm are significant.
No. What I was trying to say is that if the control is either mis-measured, for example by accidentally counting stearates as microplastics, or contaminated, then the summary outcome may underestimate or understate the prevalence of microplastics in the test sample, even though the measurement over-estimated it.
> What do you mean? Contamination and mis-measurement of control samples is a thing that actually happens all the time, and invalidates experiments when discovered.
The entire point of a control is to test for that sort of contamination (or more generally, for malfunctions in the experimental workflow). In the case of a negative control, specifically, you're looking for an "positive" where one should not exist. If an experiment is set up such that you can obtain differential contamination in the controls but not the experimental arms, as you've described, then the entire experiment is invalid.
> What I was trying to say is that if the control is either mis-measured, for example by accidentally counting stearates as microplastics, or contaminated, then the summary outcome may underestimate or understate the prevalence of microplastics in the test sample, even though the measurement over-estimated it.
The control cannot be "mis-measured", any more or less than the other arms can be "mis-measured". You treat them identically, otherwise the control is not a control. Neither example you've given are exceptions: if the assay mistakes chemical B for chemical A, then it will also do so for the non-controls. If the experimental process contaminates the controls, it will also contaminate the non-controls.
What you're missing is that there's no absolute "correct" measurement -- yes, the control may itself be contaminated with something you don't even know about, thus "understating" the absolute measurement of whatever thing you're looking for, but the absolute measurement was never the goal. You're looking for between-group differences, nothing more.
Just to make it clearer, if I were going to run an extremely naïve experiment of this sort (i.e. detection of trace chemical contamination C via super-sensitive assay A) with any hope of validity, I'd want to do multiple replications of a dilution series, each with independent negative and positive controls. I'd then use something like ANOVA to look for significant deviations across the group means. This is like the "science 101" version of the experimental design. Any failure of any control means the experiment goes in the trash. Any "significant" result that doesn't follow the expected dilution series patterns, again, goes in the trash.
(This is, of course, after doing everything you can to mitigate for baseline levels of the contaminant in the lab environment, which is a process that itself probably requires multiple failed iterations of the experiment I just described.)
Most of the plastic contamination papers I have read are far, far from even that naïve baseline.
> The entire point of a control is to test for that sort of contamination
No, the point of a control is to give you a reference point that shares all the systemic biases and unknown unknowns, not to detect those biases. If you follow the same procedure on a known null and on your experiment and observe an effect, assuming you really did exactly the same thing except the studied intervention, you can subtract out the bias.
This one example of technical jargon diverging from colloquial or intuitive use, and it is the type of thing people who haven't had statistics or scientific process education often struggle with because they keep applying their colloquial intuitions.
You talk like you understand this on the rest of the comment so I'm confused by this framing, and the person you are replying to points out (in my reading ) that contamination of the control 1) does happen in practice (in the sense that there was an accidental intervention) and 2) if the gloves contaminated both the measurements and control the same way then the control is exactly serving it's purposes
You’re repeating several of my points in your own words, supporting them and not arguing with them, even though your language and emphasis suggests you think you are arguing.
> then the entire experiment is invalid
Isn’t that what I said? You even quoted me saying it. But I didn’t say anything about only control being contaminated or mis-measured, I think you’re assuming something I didn’t say. Validity is, of course, compromised if the control is compromised, regardless of what happens to the test samples.
> The control cannot be “mis-measured” […] yes, the control may itself be contaminated […]
So which is it? Isn’t the article we’re commenting on talking about the possibility of mis-measuring? Are you suggesting this article cannot possibly be an issue when measuring control samples? Why not?
Controls absolutely can be mis-measured or contaminated or both. It has been known to happen. It’s bad when this happens because it means the experiment has to be re-done.
> If the experimental process contaminates the controls, it will also contaminate the non-controls
Yes! This is exactly what I was implying, and is exactly how you might end up underestimating the relative presence of whatever you’re looking for in the test, if your classification procedure overestimates it.
> You’re looking for between-group differences
Yes! and this is why if, for example, you didn’t notice your control had stearates and you counted them as microplastics accidentally, and then reported that your test sample had 2x more microplastics than your control, you might have missed the fact that your test actually had 10x more microplastics, or that your control actually had none when you thought incorrectly that it had some.
This, of course, is not the only possible outcome, not the only way that the results might be distorted. But this is one possible outcome that the Michigan paper at hand is warning against, no?
> Most of the papers I have read are far, far from even that naïve baseline.
Short of it, or exceeding it? Based on earlier comments, I assume you mean they’re not meeting your standards. I don’t know what you’ve read, and my brief googling did not seem to support your claims here so far. Can you provide some references? It would be especially helpful if you showed recent/modern SOTA papers, work that is considered accurate, and is highly referenced.
I agree completely. My point is that documenting methodology is standard practice, as is strict quality control, in the microplastics literature. I don’t know what controls are missing according to GP, and we don’t yet have references here to back up that claim. By and large I think researchers are aware of the difficulties measuring this stuff, and doing everything they can to ensure valid science.
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 all 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 interest that doesn't turn into self-keyword-association
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)
> 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.
I used to be a code monkey, I wrote systems software at megacorps, and still can't understand why so many programmers irresponsibly write memory unsafe code given it has a global impact.
That's the analogy working as intended: the answer to "why do programmers still write memory-unsafe code" is the same shape as "why do microplastics researchers still wear gloves." The real answer is boring and full of tradeoffs. The HN thread version skips to indignation: "they never thought of contamination so ipso facto all the research is suspect"
(to go a bit further, in case it's confusing: both you and I agree on "why do people opt-in to memunsafe code in 2026? There’s no reason to" - yet, we also understand why Linux/Android/Windows/macOS/ffmpeg/ls aren't 100% $INSERT_MEM_SAFE_LANGUAGE yet, and in fact, most new written for them is memunsafe)
You joke, but given that SWE/AI researchers literally invented AI that does everything else for them and is often super-human at intelligence across most things, I would unironically prefer the opinion of the creator of such a system over most others for most things.
I cooked a steak yesterday therefore I am an expert in biology.
Creating a user interface for the world’s knowledge doesn’t make the developer an expert on the knowledge that the interface holds in its database. Regardless of how sophisticated that interface might be.
You don’t need to be qualified to be unsure about something. Being unsure is a healthy position because it’s an acknowledgment that you don’t know something entirely. Which can also means you have an open mind to learn more about that subject.
Being certain, on the other hand, requires an assumption that you are a subject expert.
But this is all moot anyway because you’re constructing an elaborate strawman here. The original point was that the GP (possibly you?) trusts SWE more than others because they built AI. And I said building databases doesn’t make you smart at the subject loaded into the database.
Really, this whole premise of SWEs assuming expertise on subjects they’ve trained AI on says more about the Dunning-Kruger effect than anything of value in our little tangent.
You can be skeptical in wrong ways. See solipsism for example.
Typically when I get genuine responses to the question, "What would change your mind?" it's an incredibly high bar that is practically impossible to achieve. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but when skepticism is applied without deliberation, it supports biases rather than truth.
So yes, you do need to be qualified to be skeptical, SWEs doubly so.
johnbarron didn't find it. The authors cited it as foundational to their own work. it's ref. 38 in the paper under discussion. From the paper: "this finding had not been reported in the MP literature until 2020, when Witzig et al. reported that laboratory gloves submerged in water leached residues that were misidentified as polyethylene."[1]
> "most of these plastic studies are [not] doing the necessary controls"
which studies? The paper they linked surveys 26 QA/QC review articles[1]. Seems well understood.
> "a laboratory setting where nanomolar detection levels are used to make broad claims"
This is like saying "miles per gallon" when discussing weight. "nanomolar detection levels"...microplastics are individual particles identified by spectroscopy, reported as particles per mm^2. "Nanomolar" is a dissolved-species concentration unit. It has nothing to do with particle counting. (I, and other laymen, understand what you mean but you go on later in the thread to justify your unsourced and unjustified claims here via your subject-matter expertise.)
> "(almost impossible) task of preventing the contamination"
The paper provides open-access spectral libraries and conformal prediction workflows to identify and subtract stearate false positives from existing datasets[1]. Prevention isn't the strategy. Correction is. That's the entire point of the paper they linked and the follow-up in [2]
> This is like saying "miles per gallon" when discussing weight. "nanomolar detection levels"...microplastics are individual particles identified by spectroscopy, reported as particles per mm^2. "Nanomolar" is a dissolved-species concentration unit. It has nothing to do with particle counting. (I, and other laymen, understand what you mean but you go on later in the thread to justify your unsourced and unjustified claims here via your subject-matter expertise.)
This paper used “light-based spectroscopy” [1]. Many others use methods that depend on gas chromatography or NMR. A relatively infamous recent example used pyrolysis GCMS to make low-concentration measurements (hence: nanomolar), which they credulously scaled up by some huge factor, and then made idiotic claims about plastic spoons in brains.
Relatively little quantitative science in this area depends on counting plastic particles in microscopic images, but it’s what gets headlines, because laypeople understand pictures.
[1] as an aside, the choice of terminology here is noteworthy. A simple visual light absorption spectra is also “light based spectroscopy”, but is measuring the aggregate response of a sample of a heterogeneous mixture, and is conventionally converted to molar equivalents via some sort of calibration curve (otherwise you can’t conclude anything). But there could be other approaches that are closer to microscopy, which they also discuss. “Particles per square millimeter” is also a unit of concentration (albeit a shitty one, unless your particles are of uniform mass).
Anyway, the point is that these kinds of quantitative analyses are all trying to do measurements that are fundamentally about concentration, which is why I chose the words that I did.
"1 nanomole of polyethylene" requires you to pick an arbitrary average molecular weight.
This changes the answer by orders of magnitude depending on what you pick.
Which is why nobody does it.
> Relatively little quantitative science in this area depends on counting plastic particles in microscopic images...Many others use methods that depend on gas chromatography or NMR.
So we're dismissive of some subset of papers, because they get false positives using toy methods.
Real science would use gas chromatography.
But...the paper we're dismissing tested gas chromatography. And found the same false positive. [1, in abstract]
> A relatively infamous recent example used pyrolysis GCMS to make low-concentration measurements (hence: nanomolar)
The brain study I'm guessing you are referring to, [2], measured low concentrations, yes.
But it reported them in ug/g.
Because polymers don't have a defined molecular weight.
> made idiotic claims about plastic spoons in brains
The brain study I'm guessing you are referring to, [2], does not mention spoons, or, come close.
Are we sure there's a paper that did that?
[1] Witzig et al, https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.0c03742, "Therefore, u-Raman, u-FTIR, and pyr-GC/MS were further tested for their capability to distinguish among PE, sodium dodecyl sulfate, and stearates. It became clear that stearates and sodium dodecyl sulfates can cause substantial overestimation of PE."
Not sure what you mean or how it’s related. If the idea is microplastics aren’t actually a problem, I’m totally open to that. But “it’s possible everyone involved is overrating it due to scientists seeing fatty acids or hydrocarbons and calling it plastic” needs a little more than anon assertion :)
PE consists of very long hydrocarbon chains. It can degrade into shorter hydrocarbon chains. Fatty acids also have long hydrocarbon chains. The detection method for microplastics commonly involves pyrolysis, which breaks down polymers into smaller molecules. It's not hard to see that they'll end up looking nearly the same.
>>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...
"Nitrile and latex gloves that scientists wear while they are measuring microplastics may lead to a potential overestimation of the tiny pollutants, according to a University of Michigan study."
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.
The Phantom of Heilbronn, often alternatively referred to as the Woman Without a Face, was a hypothesized unknown female serial killer whose existence was inferred from DNA evidence found at numerous crime scenes in Austria, France and Germany from 1993 to 2009.
The only connection between the crimes was the presence of DNA from a single female, which had been recovered from 40 crime scenes, ranging from murders to burglaries. In late March 2009, investigators concluded that there was no "phantom criminal", and the DNA had already been present on the cotton swabs used for collecting DNA samples; it belonged to a woman who worked at the factory where they were made.
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.
The various "OMG MICROPLASTICS" studies always smacked of alarmism. No one has actually identified tangible harms from microplastics; it's just taken as a given that they are bad. So this fueled a bunch of studies that tried to find them everywhere. Even the authors of this study go to great pains to not challenge the dogma that microplastics are existentially terrifying. So I fully expect we'll still be panicking over vague, undefined harm whenever we find microplastics somewhere.
This type of research requires very little creativity or study design -- just throw a dart in a room and try and find microplastics in whatever it lands on. Boom, you get a grant for your study, and journalists will cover your result because it gets clicks. Whenever this type of incentive exists, we should be very skeptical of a rapidly-emerging consensus.
So, I think that while it's true that we haven't really demonstrated any tangible harms of microplastics, and there is a lot of alarmism around it, I think the concern is more rational than it might appear.
If it's true that microplastics are everywhere and in everything (which maybe that's now not actually the case), even a very small chance that there's some serious harm we're not aware of should be taken extremely seriously, because at this point there's (apparently) no practical way to avoid or get away from them, or to even stop producing them. And since they're such a new phenomenon in these quantities, we haven't really had the time to really drill down and figure out *if* there are longterm negative effects.
IMO, we should be intellectually humble about our lack of knowledge on these microplastics, and part of that humility should involve being cautious about introducing them to our bodies and environment.
asking, for all tasks shown to introduce large amounts of microplastics in our bodies and environment, "can we accomplish this task in a way that doesn't introduce microplastics in our bodies and environment"?
For example, using a reusable metal gourd instead of plastic water bottles for the task of 'portable hydration'.
and because this is Hacker News, I'll kindly welcome the comment: 'well actually metal gourds have some toxic substance in the lining that's worse than microplastics' and reply: ok, Cardboard bottles then. Or a gourd made of a sheep's bladder like back in the good ol' days, whatever they used back in the bronze age.
I think we avoid the whole "personality responsibility" and "these paper straws fucking suck" angle with water bottles and the like and instead focus on "do we need a factory in China making 15,000,000 plastic trinkets for happy meals" or "does literally every single item for sale on the entire planet have to come in plastic wrapping", etc
We aren't really looking. In the most well known case we were able to identify they were killing salmon because the salmon were dieing and worked back from that, not because some study led there first.
Given the track record of other things we introduced to the environment in mass quantities only to realize later were horrifyingly detrimental (CFCs and tetraethyl lead, etc) -- i think people are right that we should not take such a thing lightly
Not that it really matters, climate driven ecological collapse will probably make it irrelevant by the time it would matter
Beware of the confirmation bias, it works both ways. Reporting might be alarmist (it always is), actual research is largely not. This study doesn't discredit the entire field, it's pretty obvious that microplastics are everywhere and different types are harmful to an unclear extent, even if the amount might be overestimated in some studies.
>This type of research requires very little creativity or study design -- just throw a dart in a room and try and find microplastics in whatever it lands on. Boom, you get a grant for your study
Precisely, and mapping of that kind is entirely valid and required in huge amounts to have the full picture. Somebody has to do the grunt work.
> Even the authors of this study go to great pains to not challenge the dogma that microplastics are existentially terrifying.
What great pains are they going through? The study is a discussion of measurement techniques and makes no comment on whether they are harmful because that’s irrelevant to the paper.
This could just as easily be a paper on how wearing the wrong type of gloves results in overestimating calcium in soil. You’re the one injecting a political agenda.
Hey remember what happened with BPA? That was frustrating. We saw ostensibly legitimate concern, then manufacturers telling us they got rid of it. Maybe it would’ve inspired confidence if the removal adverts came with data sheets on the replacement chemicals.
Peter Attia (I know, but I trust his ability to synthesize medical research) did a whole deep dive on this and IIRC determined that for the most part, it wasn't a big concern for anyone with remotely normal consumption patterns.
One could say that all living beings are made of naturally occurring microplastics, long before humans even existed. After all, where else did that oil in the ground come from?
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.
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.
> 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 think that because I was a food service worker and it's impossible to change gloves during a rush. Nitrile gloves and sweaty hands simply do not mix. There are also many more forms of cross contamination than just raw meat to cooked food.
I don't have the slightest idea what you're talking about.
You can dry your hands on a towel in seconds. I don't know what you mean by "perfectly dry"...? Like, nobody needs to blow-dry their hands before putting gloves on or anything.
I do a medical procedure several times a week that requires gloves.
If you don't flap your hands around for 30+ seconds, any remaining moisture from handwashing (or sweat) makes them stick to your skin and you wind up fighting them (and about half the time, ripping a hole). A towel is not enough.
I variously use nitrile, vinyl, and poly gloves when cooking messy things at home in bulk, like chicken, bacon, etc. I regularly pull them off to do something and then throw a new pair back on. They can be kinda sweaty and it's... fine. Zero problem whatsoever sliding on a new pair.
I'm not doubting your personal experience. I'm just saying it's in no way a universal rule. I'm sure experiences will be different depending on glove material, glove size, and just the different shapes of different people's hands.
But for me and for plenty of people I've worked with earlier in my life, swapping gloves was way faster and easier than washing hands again. Plus, washing your hands like 40 times in a shift is going to dry them out. It's not great.
> But for me and for plenty of people I've worked with earlier in my life, swapping gloves was way faster and easier than washing hands again. Plus, washing your hands like 40 times in a shift is going to dry them out. It's not great.
You and your former coworkers must have magic lubricating sweat or something. I have literally never encountered someone with this opinion before in my life. And I was a combat medic before I was a line cook, so I think I know a thing or two about gloves. Even in the medical field, there were times when medics skipped the gloves because they were treating their buddies under fire and the time to get gloves on wasn't worth it to them (for anyone unfamiliar, gloves in field medicine are mostly about protecting the provider, not the patient).
I think this might come down to sizing. Larger glove for hand size makes them easy to put on but hard to use for fine motor actions, whereas a well fitting glove makes any wetness on the hand a time sink. The stretchiness is the mechanism by which they both fit well and are hard to put on, but if you are willing to give up fit they don't need to stretch and you can just throw them on.
> 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.
> It's more than just procedure or habit, your hands feel dirty and you want to wash that off.
I'm not sure that's reliable across people. I'm definitely like that; whenever my hands feel the least bit dirty or oily or anything, I really want to wash them. But I've run into people who have commented on the fact that I do that, and I've learned that there are lots of people who just don't have that compulsion at all.
My point is that changing gloves is something that is even less reliable and needs to be drilled in through procedure and habit. Handwashing also needs the procedure and habit, but it has the added benefit that for a good number of people there's also a physical compulsion that goes along with that procedure and habit.
Food safety regulations in most states require that food workers replace gloves if they handle raw meat and switch to other foodstuffs.
But they don't generally require them to replace gloves between batches of (the same kind of) meat, or between different kinds of vegetables, or when switching from vegetables to meat, or between customers if they're on a service line. While it's recommended in those situations, I'm not sure any state mandates it.
I mean, they don't require gloves to be replaced in those situations because there isn't a good safety reason to. There's zero reason to replace your gloves when switching from dicing green peppers for a salad to picking up raw chicken. Or similarly between customers if you're just handling food, and not a cash register or anything. It's not like you're touching the customers...
People also don't develop good habits and constantly touch their face with gloves. I worked with surgeons in the hospital and they would point this out. Equally important in a cleanroom.
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.
Stearates are considered very safe chemical compounds. They are derived from stearic acid which is one of the most common fatty acids and metal ions such as sodium and magnesium. Sodium stearate is a common soap and magnesium stearate is one of the most common additives in pharmaceuticals. This means that they are practically everywhere and but also easily digested in small amounts.
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.
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.
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.
Thanks and noted, I'm happy to accept your figure. Even at 40% by number density that still means microplastics are hardly rare. I don't need to nitpick the exact number.
It was just an aside anyway. My main point is that MPs are vehicles for toxins, which addresses the original question about how (supposedly inert) microplastics can cause harm.
Thanks again for setting me straight, I must have misremembered.
It's good to keep in mind that there are a very broad range of figures. The Japan one was just the highest I could find with a quick search.
I like this study https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12302-019-0279-9 not so much because they give a definitive answer, but the provide a much better sense of the nuance that bold claims miss. It's too easy to make a bold claim of a number that seemingly contradicts another similarly bold claim. The nuanced approach can often reveal that both bold claims are, in fact, true but not meaningful because they lose significant context.
For example, a lot of reports on water use neglect locality of the use. What the term 'use' means (how much water does a hydroelectric dam use, is that the same sense of use as irrigation?), is there scarcity where it is used? Is it the same class of water as the water in demand (potable / brine / etc.)
The haphazard use of terms has resulted in an insane range of claims of water use per AI query (or lithium mined, or tomatoes grown). The lack of faith leads people to assume one party is lying, but often all of the numbers are accurate in a kind of way. Just not comparable and sometimes not even meaningful
I see you still don't say microplastics are rare. Violently agreeing with each-other, it seems. ;)
Synthetic textiles (clothes, upholstery, carpet, dryer exhaust, washer drainage) are of course the biggest culprits, with most of that trapped indoors with us, or co-located with human activity. If you have a dog that may change the mass fraction, but the MP exposure remains the same (or worse due to additional wear).
Road and tire wear is the other big contributor, again co-localized with population density. That's one of those nuanced cases, because a large fraction of the tire mass is actually natural rubber. The synthetic additives make it categorized as 100% plastic, but this may not accurately reflect reality in terms of the chemistry or hazard-based analysis.
These porous polymer powders consist entirely of microscopic little sponges where they soak up and/or leach out all kinds of chemicals more so than the plain polymer, and with different affinity too.
However, even when common waste plastic particles themselves are not microscopically porous, different plastics soak up different chemicals to different degrees depending on what type of contact they come into. For instance kilos of polyethylene nurdles floating in the water will actually become "soaked" with some hydrocarbon liquids that are also floating or dissolved in the water. Even physically softened. These are very solid pea-sized beads that are not micro-sized plastics at all. They would have to degrade a whole lot before they fall into the micro category. And they are not manufactured to intentionally have a nano-porous structure like the finer mesh porous polymer powders.
Chemicals and plastics just don't go away so safely every time.
The stearates aren't microplastics, they aren't polymers, but they have chemical/spectroscopic similarity that results in them confusing the microplastics assays.
The transparent disposable food-service gloves are usually polyethylene so I wouldn't think they would have the exact same false-positive result as the nitrile gloves. Microscopic particles of stearates are what's on these nitrile gloves, not actual polymer dust or excess abrasive losses.
Maybe a different false-positive particle type in significant amounts is on the polyethylene ones ?
Pure stearates in micro amounts would be expected to be related to mild food-grade soaps, which do end up dissolving in water or oil and do not remain solid like a relatively immobile polymer particle would do.
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.
"Chemically very similar", as in "contains long hydrocarbon chains", something which even all biological matter (lipids) has. I've looked at a few microplastic studies and many of them use pyrolysis and mass spectroscopy to detect their presence, which is going to show almost the same results for animal fat as pure hydrocarbon plastics like PE (the most common plastic by production volume) and PP.
The non-trivial part isn't contamination per se, it's that the contaminant is chemically and spectroscopically similar enough to evade standard discrimination
"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. You'd also want to run samples with known and controlled micro-plastic concentrations. Why didn't they do this? Their results are utterly meaningless if they didn't.
That does seem like an oversight. We routinely run process blanks for elemental analysis at my job. I guess if the metal substrates had specifications on no particles you might skip this, obviously a big mistake if another step (ie. handling with gloves) introduced contamination.
In surface science the baggy clear polyethylene are widely known to be cleaner than other options.
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.
I once worked in a meatball factory. I touched almost every single meatball with nitrile gloves. There's probably a lot of earlier process steps where humans are touching the food with gloves.
I had always assumed there was a methodological failure that kept getting replicated. There were enough articles like "scientists find microplastics at bottom of peat bog" that really made me dubious of the claims.
"Strong claims require strong evidence". Somehow it happens pretty regularly in academia that only one method becomes acceptable and any conflicting results get herded out on technical grounds.
I think it's partly deliberate and partly ignorance of chemistry. We are simply finding that biological matter is nearly indistinguishable from man-made microplastics.
Also consider how many people have to wear them every day or close to. How much they interact with food and packages that most of us eventually touch. Food for thought.
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 way this study was done makes perfect sense for finding this cross-contamination issue, but does not actually address how microplastics samples are extracted and found in sampling studies.
The below meta-study largely discusses sampling methods and protection from cross contamination so everyone here acting like this one study’s somehow invalidates decades of quality research:
>Due to the wide contamination of the environment with microplastics, including air [29], measures should be taken during sampling to reduce the contamination with these particles and fibers. The five rules to reduce cross-contamination of microplastic samples are: (1) using glass and metal equipment instead of plastics, which can introduce contamination; (2) avoiding the use of synthetic textiles during sampling or sample handling, preferring the use of 100% cotton lab coat; (3) cleaning the surfaces with 70% ethanol and paper towels, washing the equipment with acid followed by ultrapure water, using consumables directly from packaging and filtering all working solutions; (4) using open petri dishes, procedural blanks and replicates to control for airborne contamination; (5) keeping samples covered as much as possible and handling them in clean rooms with controlled air circulation, limited access (e.g. doors and windows closed) and limited circulation, preferentially in a fume hood or algae-culturing unit, or by covering the equipment during handling [15], [26], [95], [105], [107]. A fume hood can reduce 50% of the contamination [105] while covering samples during filtration, digestion and visual identification can reduce more than 90% of contamination [95].
So don’t ghost ride the whip about the death of the microplastic plague just yet.
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.
Studies are extremely difficult to get right. I'm generally a little bit skeptical of data for this reason.
A bit of a tangent but still on the subject of environmental pollution; the other day I found out that CO2 sensor sensitivity naturally drifts over time... So when a CO2 sensor is replaced for long term climate research, if they try to calibrate the new sensor to the old one at the time of replacement, the drift would be carried over into the new sensor even if no actual real change of CO2 occurred... Apparently there are standards to prevent this but mistakes have been identified multiple times with the methodology for setting that standard... Anyway measuring data accurately is really hard.
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.
Why do you say "nothing to see here" ? The existence of the earlier paper does not imply that procedures corrected for this afterwards. Is there any published protocol for a study since that first article that mentions avoiding stearate powder from gloves ?
> 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,”
And with some actual numbers, when digging in further:
> They found that on average, the gloves imparted about 2,000 false positives per millimeter squared area.
> 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 reason this is important is that one flawed dataset reports a hopeless situation; the other at least provides a “if we stop now” message.
Decades ago the only modern disposable gloves like these were "natural" latex which served medical professionals well but were miserably inadequate for chemical use. So nobody even thought about using them with aggressive industrial materials.
Nitrile emerged only as a specialty alternative to some of the earlier synthetic chemical-resistant compounds.
They were not disposable, more expensive than the earlier synthetic compounds, also not as thick a glove was needed so they gave you protection that was never available from anything but a much more clumsy alternative. Not nearly as tactile as the disposables though, that is their big redeeming feature.
One of the major weak points of nitrile is acetone, and things like MEK or ethyl acetate, which will soak into the polymer, swell, and weaken it. If you don't let them get too weak and shred them, they will shrink back after they dry out and are still fairly OK after that But nitrile is much better against most other solvents, acids, and alkalis though. Chlorinated solvents can be kind of rough too.
I was often the first one to use nitrile in some facilities, these ended up taking over and were the typical turquoise non-disposable ones that go about halfway up the forearm. Not the skin-tight "student models" that so many people use today. Now available in various colors :)
But these early "green" gloves alone were the same ones contributing to the stereotypical look of an environmental worker, where they can be even more scary when they sometimes add a complete tyvek suit with boots, hood, respirator, and the gloves with rubber bands around the sleeves, sampling the river water while you are fishing downstream :(
The ones like we used are $16 a pair now and were never cheap enough to be disposable. They actually last many months though. Only one other old guy uses them when I go back to my old lab, everyone else was "trained" on disposables now, each lab has a wall-mounted dispenser of various sizes like they have in hospitals. The "cost savings" are so well-realized so long ago that nobody knows it's completely false :\ People go through them like water, and it's still a shitshow when they try not to.
It's really worse from a contamination standpoint because people will still wear them for an hour or two during various chemical-handling events, but also do a little paperwork or keyboard typing with the gloves on, plus doorknobs and cabinet handles they are touching are much riskier than it used to be when disposables were not an option. Just because it's such a drag to peel them off and put on a new pair 10 minutes later.
Before disposables arrived, we used to have slightly oversized non-disposables, and throw them on & off & on many times per day, I still do. Plus I often wash the gloves while wearing them not much differently than washing my bare hands, mainly to get rid of chemicals using (very) hot soap & water or even using other strong solvents like heptane to rinse off heavier chemicals and oils. Probably about as particle-free as you can get except for what is floating around in the ambient air. Not like the skin-tight almost too-thin gloves people settle for now where they need to be peeled back off inside-out and thrown away each time.
By this point in the 21st century there are dedicated representatives of the glove manufacturers making high-touch sales calls, so there have got to be some bonuses that didn't exist that many decades ago.
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.
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 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).
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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?
I think you underestimate how much plastic is consumed in a lab doing experiments or analysis. I suspect it's an order of magnitude or two more than people are regularly exposed to at home or other non-industrial settings.
When I was an automation engineer at a lab, each liquid handler alone could go through several pounds of plastic pipette tips in a single day. All of that is made out of plastic and coated in a different thin layer of plastic to change the wettability of the tip. Even the glassware often comes coated in plastic and all these coatings are the thin layers most likely to create microplastics from abrasion (like the force of the pipette picking up the tip!). Throw all the packaging on top of that and there is just an insane amount of plastic.
The only place I've seen more plastic consumed is industrial and food manufacturing where everything is sprayed and resprayed with plastic coatings to reduce fouling.
> 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
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
I am right and I suspect you know it... you just don't like the way it makes you feel. Hence your focus on vibes and ad hominums rather than reason.
It is self evident that moderm science is too complex for the average person to understand, and fifty percent of us are less intelligent than even that.
> It is self evident that moderm science is too complex for the average person to understand, and fifty percent of us are less intelligent than even that.
I think you're grossly overestimating the complexity of most modern science outside of physics and mathematics (and computing, as an intersection of the two).
Good science is actually pretty easy to explain most of the time. It may take a long time to become a domain expert thst can perform novel research in a field but it it's well within the understanding of most people to have a single topic explained to them by an expert.
In fact, that very thing happens in courtrooms all the time.
Your condescending attitude is why people don't trust authorities and with good reason. If you can't help people understand science, it's you that doesn't understand it.
Furthermore, I hope you realize how close your "self-evident" logic is to a lot of extremely gross and genocidal ideologies of the past and present.
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.
Not for the average adult human on planet Earth, no.
Fifty percent of people are of below average intelligence. Of the 50% that remain only a fraction have access to the equipment necessary to replicate any given experiment, of that fraction only a small percentage will have the knowledge, skills, and abilities to accurately replicate any given experiment, of that tiny fraction only a much tinier fraction will have the KSA's to interpret those results in a meaningful way.
Science should replicate. That does not automatically imply that YOU should be the one replicating it.
For the average person science should mean knowing how to determine if someone is more qualified than they are and listening to them, or at least listening to the general consensus of those who are more qualified when such a consensus exists.
Yes, other peoples goals don't always align perfectly with yours, but the simple truth is that you aren't qualified or even capable of understanding everything in the world. When it comes to those subjects you must be adult enough to understand and work within your limitations.
Honestly, do you really believe that people who sacrificed large parts of their lives to become researchers are in it for the money, or out to get you? These are brilliant people who choose to take a career path that doesn't really pay well. When 99% of them tell you something is safe, Occam will tell that it's a pretty safe bet the weirdos on the fringe are just plain wrong.
There’s nothing wrong with doing your own experiments as long as you understand your limitations. But that’s not what people mean when they say they “did their own research”.
They mean that they went online and found blogs and YouTube videos that agree with whatever crackpot view they already held.
The issue with picking people and organizations to trust (which you absolutely should do) is that the average person isn’t even able to evaluate what qualified means. And RFK jr. is the guy appointing the “qualified people” who run things. On paper many of them are qualified, but in reality they’re crackpots.
You have to dig a level deeper and understand that this set of qualified people are actually just nuts who essentially performed the scientific equivalent of a coup because their ideas couldn’t win on merit.
> For the average person science should mean knowing how to determine if someone is more qualified than they
I agree. But how do you that without researching? Who makes the list of trustful institutions?
Let's pick homeopathy. The pharmacy in the corner of my home sells homeopathy too. There are even some curses in some universities [in Germany?] [I searched in MY university. Apparently there is no curse for human medicine, but there is a curse for veterinary https://www.fvet.uba.ar/?q=homeopatia .] Can we agree homeopathy is not real? How do you know?
This is all a very fun thought experiment and whatnot but the reality is the COVID vaccines went through gigantic randomized controlled trials, our absolute best known method (by a gigantic margin) to figure out what is true.
Those trials unequivocally showed extremely high effectiveness and extremely high safety.
The people who say otherwise are simply wrong in this case. No matter how much philosophizing you or they want to do on epistemology. If they want to demonstrate otherwise, they need to conduct their own trials, ideally large, randomized, blinded, placebo-controlled trials.
> in other cases they say that the "control group" is an unrelated bunch of guys in another city.
This is not how trials work and you should go "do your own research" on the basics of the methodology before you opine on higher-order things like vaccines etc.
>> in other cases they say that the "control group" is an unrelated bunch of guys in another city.
If you want to ruin your day, take a look at the hydroxychloroquine [retracted] paper by Raoult. Who is the control group? Why was it reported in the press as a 100% cure if the only death was in the trial group?
I agree that the trial to prove the effectiveness and safety of the covid-19 vaccines were much better designed. One of the reasons is that to get the approval of the FDA they must dot the i and j and cross the t and f.
To be fair, when the Covid vaccine was being rushed to be approved, I didn’t 100% trust that Trump wouldn’t pressure the FDA to approve without being confident it was safe.
So my standard at the time was that I’d take it if the FDA and at least one other developed country approved it.
Here in Argentina we approved the Sputnik vaccine. It was approved only here and in Russia. And here it was approved not by the standard office (ANMAT), but by a special resolution of the Health Ministry.
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.]
Just COVID-19. I do get other shots though, for example the annual flu shot and most recently an RSV shot (not the one I had participated in a clinical trial for.)
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.
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.
> single-use plastic that is involved in biological research
The samples were not contaminated by plastic in the gloves. Latex gloves don't contain plastic, they're made from natural rubber. Nitrile gloves also don't contain plastic, although they're very similar to plastic.
The contamination that this study found wasn't microplastic contamination. The gloves weren't adding microplastics. The gloves were adding stearates, which aren't plastic, but look like microplastic in many of the methods for measuring microplastics.
>> I'm amazed that wasn't taken into account!
This was taken into account: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47563392
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.
Many papers in this field are missing obvious controls, but you’re correct that controls alone are insufficient to solve this problem.
When you are taking measurements at the detection limit of any molecule that is widespread in the environment, you are going to have a difficult time of distinguishing signal from background. This requires sampling and replication and rigorous application of statistical inference.
> Another thing to consider is that papers generally compare against baseline/control samples,
Right, that’s what a control is.
> and overestimating microplastics in baseline samples may lead to a lower ratio of reported microplastics in the test samples, not higher.
There’s no such thing as “overestimating in baseline samples”, unless you’re just doing a different measurement entirely.
What you’re trying to say is that if there’s a chemical everywhere, the prevalence makes it harder to claim that small measurement differences in the “treatment” arm are significant. This is a feature, not a bug.
You’re still bringing up different issues than this article we are commenting on.
> There’s no such thing as “overestimating in baseline samples”
What do you mean? Contamination and mis-measurement of control samples is a thing that actually happens all the time, and invalidates experiments when discovered.
> What you’re trying to say is that if there’s a chemical everywhere, the prevalence makes it harder to claim that small measurement differences in the “treatment” arm are significant.
No. What I was trying to say is that if the control is either mis-measured, for example by accidentally counting stearates as microplastics, or contaminated, then the summary outcome may underestimate or understate the prevalence of microplastics in the test sample, even though the measurement over-estimated it.
> What do you mean? Contamination and mis-measurement of control samples is a thing that actually happens all the time, and invalidates experiments when discovered.
The entire point of a control is to test for that sort of contamination (or more generally, for malfunctions in the experimental workflow). In the case of a negative control, specifically, you're looking for an "positive" where one should not exist. If an experiment is set up such that you can obtain differential contamination in the controls but not the experimental arms, as you've described, then the entire experiment is invalid.
> What I was trying to say is that if the control is either mis-measured, for example by accidentally counting stearates as microplastics, or contaminated, then the summary outcome may underestimate or understate the prevalence of microplastics in the test sample, even though the measurement over-estimated it.
The control cannot be "mis-measured", any more or less than the other arms can be "mis-measured". You treat them identically, otherwise the control is not a control. Neither example you've given are exceptions: if the assay mistakes chemical B for chemical A, then it will also do so for the non-controls. If the experimental process contaminates the controls, it will also contaminate the non-controls.
What you're missing is that there's no absolute "correct" measurement -- yes, the control may itself be contaminated with something you don't even know about, thus "understating" the absolute measurement of whatever thing you're looking for, but the absolute measurement was never the goal. You're looking for between-group differences, nothing more.
Just to make it clearer, if I were going to run an extremely naïve experiment of this sort (i.e. detection of trace chemical contamination C via super-sensitive assay A) with any hope of validity, I'd want to do multiple replications of a dilution series, each with independent negative and positive controls. I'd then use something like ANOVA to look for significant deviations across the group means. This is like the "science 101" version of the experimental design. Any failure of any control means the experiment goes in the trash. Any "significant" result that doesn't follow the expected dilution series patterns, again, goes in the trash.
(This is, of course, after doing everything you can to mitigate for baseline levels of the contaminant in the lab environment, which is a process that itself probably requires multiple failed iterations of the experiment I just described.)
Most of the plastic contamination papers I have read are far, far from even that naïve baseline.
> The entire point of a control is to test for that sort of contamination
No, the point of a control is to give you a reference point that shares all the systemic biases and unknown unknowns, not to detect those biases. If you follow the same procedure on a known null and on your experiment and observe an effect, assuming you really did exactly the same thing except the studied intervention, you can subtract out the bias.
This one example of technical jargon diverging from colloquial or intuitive use, and it is the type of thing people who haven't had statistics or scientific process education often struggle with because they keep applying their colloquial intuitions.
You talk like you understand this on the rest of the comment so I'm confused by this framing, and the person you are replying to points out (in my reading ) that contamination of the control 1) does happen in practice (in the sense that there was an accidental intervention) and 2) if the gloves contaminated both the measurements and control the same way then the control is exactly serving it's purposes
You’re repeating several of my points in your own words, supporting them and not arguing with them, even though your language and emphasis suggests you think you are arguing.
> then the entire experiment is invalid
Isn’t that what I said? You even quoted me saying it. But I didn’t say anything about only control being contaminated or mis-measured, I think you’re assuming something I didn’t say. Validity is, of course, compromised if the control is compromised, regardless of what happens to the test samples.
> The control cannot be “mis-measured” […] yes, the control may itself be contaminated […]
So which is it? Isn’t the article we’re commenting on talking about the possibility of mis-measuring? Are you suggesting this article cannot possibly be an issue when measuring control samples? Why not?
Controls absolutely can be mis-measured or contaminated or both. It has been known to happen. It’s bad when this happens because it means the experiment has to be re-done.
> If the experimental process contaminates the controls, it will also contaminate the non-controls
Yes! This is exactly what I was implying, and is exactly how you might end up underestimating the relative presence of whatever you’re looking for in the test, if your classification procedure overestimates it.
> You’re looking for between-group differences
Yes! and this is why if, for example, you didn’t notice your control had stearates and you counted them as microplastics accidentally, and then reported that your test sample had 2x more microplastics than your control, you might have missed the fact that your test actually had 10x more microplastics, or that your control actually had none when you thought incorrectly that it had some.
This, of course, is not the only possible outcome, not the only way that the results might be distorted. But this is one possible outcome that the Michigan paper at hand is warning against, no?
> Most of the papers I have read are far, far from even that naïve baseline.
Short of it, or exceeding it? Based on earlier comments, I assume you mean they’re not meeting your standards. I don’t know what you’ve read, and my brief googling did not seem to support your claims here so far. Can you provide some references? It would be especially helpful if you showed recent/modern SOTA papers, work that is considered accurate, and is highly referenced.
Any scientific paper that does not document how things were done (methodologies) is basically worthless in the search for truth.
I agree completely. My point is that documenting methodology is standard practice, as is strict quality control, in the microplastics literature. I don’t know what controls are missing according to GP, and we don’t yet have references here to back up that claim. By and large I think researchers are aware of the difficulties measuring this stuff, and doing everything they can to ensure valid science.
Luckily HN software developers, the foremost authority on literally every subject imaginable, are here to bless the world with their insights.
I think there's an important distinction of smug better-knowing instances.
"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.
There’s also the possibility that some of us actually, you know…have subject-matter expertise.
Doubtful, in your case, no?
"Nanomolar" is a dissolved-species concentration unit. It doesn't apply to spectroscopic particle counting.
Uh, yeah. I know what the word means. See my response to the other comment where you say the same thing.
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 all 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 interest that doesn't turn into self-keyword-association
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)
> 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.
I used to be a code monkey, I wrote systems software at megacorps, and still can't understand why so many programmers irresponsibly write memory unsafe code given it has a global impact.
So Poe's law applies here.
That's the analogy working as intended: the answer to "why do programmers still write memory-unsafe code" is the same shape as "why do microplastics researchers still wear gloves." The real answer is boring and full of tradeoffs. The HN thread version skips to indignation: "they never thought of contamination so ipso facto all the research is suspect"
(to go a bit further, in case it's confusing: both you and I agree on "why do people opt-in to memunsafe code in 2026? There’s no reason to" - yet, we also understand why Linux/Android/Windows/macOS/ffmpeg/ls aren't 100% $INSERT_MEM_SAFE_LANGUAGE yet, and in fact, most new written for them is memunsafe)
Thank you for helping me understand. I get it now.
You’re ignoring the article to grind your axe.
What do you mean? (Genuinely seems you replied to wrong comment to me. What axe? What’s in the article that’s been ignored?)
They may have meant .exe
You joke, but given that SWE/AI researchers literally invented AI that does everything else for them and is often super-human at intelligence across most things, I would unironically prefer the opinion of the creator of such a system over most others for most things.
I cooked a steak yesterday therefore I am an expert in biology.
Creating a user interface for the world’s knowledge doesn’t make the developer an expert on the knowledge that the interface holds in its database. Regardless of how sophisticated that interface might be.
'I disagree, therefore I am an expert in skepticism.' The sword cuts both ways.
No it doesn’t. What you’re describing is an oxymoron.
Please. You don't get special treatment for being a skeptic. Either you have the credentials or you don't. Prove you're qualified.
You don’t need to be qualified to be unsure about something. Being unsure is a healthy position because it’s an acknowledgment that you don’t know something entirely. Which can also means you have an open mind to learn more about that subject.
Being certain, on the other hand, requires an assumption that you are a subject expert.
But this is all moot anyway because you’re constructing an elaborate strawman here. The original point was that the GP (possibly you?) trusts SWE more than others because they built AI. And I said building databases doesn’t make you smart at the subject loaded into the database.
Really, this whole premise of SWEs assuming expertise on subjects they’ve trained AI on says more about the Dunning-Kruger effect than anything of value in our little tangent.
You can be skeptical in wrong ways. See solipsism for example.
Typically when I get genuine responses to the question, "What would change your mind?" it's an incredibly high bar that is practically impossible to achieve. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but when skepticism is applied without deliberation, it supports biases rather than truth.
So yes, you do need to be qualified to be skeptical, SWEs doubly so.
Oh wow I've never seen such a prime specimen in the wild. I feel like you be pinned to a piece of cardboard in a drawer somewhere.
You'd trust a programmer to be your doctor? Or design the structure of your house?
Not OP, but:
> "You found a paper"
johnbarron didn't find it. The authors cited it as foundational to their own work. it's ref. 38 in the paper under discussion. From the paper: "this finding had not been reported in the MP literature until 2020, when Witzig et al. reported that laboratory gloves submerged in water leached residues that were misidentified as polyethylene."[1]
> "most of these plastic studies are [not] doing the necessary controls"
which studies? The paper they linked surveys 26 QA/QC review articles[1]. Seems well understood.
> "a laboratory setting where nanomolar detection levels are used to make broad claims"
This is like saying "miles per gallon" when discussing weight. "nanomolar detection levels"...microplastics are individual particles identified by spectroscopy, reported as particles per mm^2. "Nanomolar" is a dissolved-species concentration unit. It has nothing to do with particle counting. (I, and other laymen, understand what you mean but you go on later in the thread to justify your unsourced and unjustified claims here via your subject-matter expertise.)
> "(almost impossible) task of preventing the contamination"
The paper provides open-access spectral libraries and conformal prediction workflows to identify and subtract stearate false positives from existing datasets[1]. Prevention isn't the strategy. Correction is. That's the entire point of the paper they linked and the follow-up in [2]
[1] https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlehtml/2026/ay/d5ay0180...
[2] https://news.umich.edu/nitrile-and-latex-gloves-may-cause-ov...
> This is like saying "miles per gallon" when discussing weight. "nanomolar detection levels"...microplastics are individual particles identified by spectroscopy, reported as particles per mm^2. "Nanomolar" is a dissolved-species concentration unit. It has nothing to do with particle counting. (I, and other laymen, understand what you mean but you go on later in the thread to justify your unsourced and unjustified claims here via your subject-matter expertise.)
This paper used “light-based spectroscopy” [1]. Many others use methods that depend on gas chromatography or NMR. A relatively infamous recent example used pyrolysis GCMS to make low-concentration measurements (hence: nanomolar), which they credulously scaled up by some huge factor, and then made idiotic claims about plastic spoons in brains.
Relatively little quantitative science in this area depends on counting plastic particles in microscopic images, but it’s what gets headlines, because laypeople understand pictures.
[1] as an aside, the choice of terminology here is noteworthy. A simple visual light absorption spectra is also “light based spectroscopy”, but is measuring the aggregate response of a sample of a heterogeneous mixture, and is conventionally converted to molar equivalents via some sort of calibration curve (otherwise you can’t conclude anything). But there could be other approaches that are closer to microscopy, which they also discuss. “Particles per square millimeter” is also a unit of concentration (albeit a shitty one, unless your particles are of uniform mass).
Anyway, the point is that these kinds of quantitative analyses are all trying to do measurements that are fundamentally about concentration, which is why I chose the words that I did.
> ...
"1 nanomole of polyethylene" requires you to pick an arbitrary average molecular weight.
This changes the answer by orders of magnitude depending on what you pick.
Which is why nobody does it.
> Relatively little quantitative science in this area depends on counting plastic particles in microscopic images...Many others use methods that depend on gas chromatography or NMR.
So we're dismissive of some subset of papers, because they get false positives using toy methods.
Real science would use gas chromatography.
But...the paper we're dismissing tested gas chromatography. And found the same false positive. [1, in abstract]
> A relatively infamous recent example used pyrolysis GCMS to make low-concentration measurements (hence: nanomolar)
The brain study I'm guessing you are referring to, [2], measured low concentrations, yes.
But it reported them in ug/g.
Because polymers don't have a defined molecular weight.
> made idiotic claims about plastic spoons in brains
The brain study I'm guessing you are referring to, [2], does not mention spoons, or, come close.
Are we sure there's a paper that did that?
[1] Witzig et al, https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.0c03742, "Therefore, u-Raman, u-FTIR, and pyr-GC/MS were further tested for their capability to distinguish among PE, sodium dodecyl sulfate, and stearates. It became clear that stearates and sodium dodecyl sulfates can cause substantial overestimation of PE."
[2] Campen et al, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38765967/, "Bioaccumulation of Microplastics in Decedent Human Brains"
Doesn't take an expert to see that fatty acids and hydrocarbon chains from the degradation of polyethylene look nearly the same.
Not sure what you mean or how it’s related. If the idea is microplastics aren’t actually a problem, I’m totally open to that. But “it’s possible everyone involved is overrating it due to scientists seeing fatty acids or hydrocarbons and calling it plastic” needs a little more than anon assertion :)
PE consists of very long hydrocarbon chains. It can degrade into shorter hydrocarbon chains. Fatty acids also have long hydrocarbon chains. The detection method for microplastics commonly involves pyrolysis, which breaks down polymers into smaller molecules. It's not hard to see that they'll end up looking nearly the same.
Fair enough! I'll add that to my pile of "evidence of microplastics overestimation"
>> That doesn’t mean that most of these plastic studies are doing the necessary controls
That was never my argument. Read it again.
> I'm amazed that wasn't taken into account!
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.
>>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...
The article starts with this:
"Nitrile and latex gloves that scientists wear while they are measuring microplastics may lead to a potential overestimation of the tiny pollutants, according to a University of Michigan study."
Classic. This is like that female serial killer in Europe that turned out to actually just be DNA from a woman making the DNA collection swabs.
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.
Plot twist: the woman making the DNA collection swabs was the serial killer.
turns out she's also calling from inside the house!
Lost Highway reference?
It's the perfect cover!
Someone should make a show about that… her name could be Dexterette!
Sad to see that you are downvoted. It's sad seeing that Hackernews doesn't understand Dexter memes.. (Amazing show, Highly recommended)
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)
This isn’t Reddit. Awesome bacon sauce posts generally aren’t appreciated
When your methods get really sensitive, you stop just measuring the world and start measuring your own process too
I thought that exact thing and opened the comments to see you’d already commented with it.
There is a “case files” podcast on it that I found quite good.
This seems to be the Casefile episode about the "Phantom of Heilbronn"
https://casefilepodcast.com/case-178-the-woman-without-a-fac...
The Phantom of Heilbronn, often alternatively referred to as the Woman Without a Face, was a hypothesized unknown female serial killer whose existence was inferred from DNA evidence found at numerous crime scenes in Austria, France and Germany from 1993 to 2009.
The only connection between the crimes was the presence of DNA from a single female, which had been recovered from 40 crime scenes, ranging from murders to burglaries. In late March 2009, investigators concluded that there was no "phantom criminal", and the DNA had already been present on the cotton swabs used for collecting DNA samples; it belonged to a woman who worked at the factory where they were made.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_of_Heilbronn
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.
I see you're not a fan of hyperbole. Though I sorta meant it, so maybe it's not.
They weren't DNA collection swabs, but sterile swabs intended for medical use.
That’s why you’re supposed to submit an unused swab with the samples, so that they can make sure the swab itself isn’t the source.
That only works if both swabs suffered the same contamination. If the contamination is sporadic, then it won't show.
And the method to analyze the swabs could also contain contaminations that screw the results.
The various "OMG MICROPLASTICS" studies always smacked of alarmism. No one has actually identified tangible harms from microplastics; it's just taken as a given that they are bad. So this fueled a bunch of studies that tried to find them everywhere. Even the authors of this study go to great pains to not challenge the dogma that microplastics are existentially terrifying. So I fully expect we'll still be panicking over vague, undefined harm whenever we find microplastics somewhere.
This type of research requires very little creativity or study design -- just throw a dart in a room and try and find microplastics in whatever it lands on. Boom, you get a grant for your study, and journalists will cover your result because it gets clicks. Whenever this type of incentive exists, we should be very skeptical of a rapidly-emerging consensus.
So, I think that while it's true that we haven't really demonstrated any tangible harms of microplastics, and there is a lot of alarmism around it, I think the concern is more rational than it might appear.
If it's true that microplastics are everywhere and in everything (which maybe that's now not actually the case), even a very small chance that there's some serious harm we're not aware of should be taken extremely seriously, because at this point there's (apparently) no practical way to avoid or get away from them, or to even stop producing them. And since they're such a new phenomenon in these quantities, we haven't really had the time to really drill down and figure out *if* there are longterm negative effects.
IMO, we should be intellectually humble about our lack of knowledge on these microplastics, and part of that humility should involve being cautious about introducing them to our bodies and environment.
> and part of that humility should involve being cautious about introducing them to our bodies and environment.
What does that look like today, pragmatically speaking?
Stone tires.
asking, for all tasks shown to introduce large amounts of microplastics in our bodies and environment, "can we accomplish this task in a way that doesn't introduce microplastics in our bodies and environment"?
For example, using a reusable metal gourd instead of plastic water bottles for the task of 'portable hydration'.
and because this is Hacker News, I'll kindly welcome the comment: 'well actually metal gourds have some toxic substance in the lining that's worse than microplastics' and reply: ok, Cardboard bottles then. Or a gourd made of a sheep's bladder like back in the good ol' days, whatever they used back in the bronze age.
I think we avoid the whole "personality responsibility" and "these paper straws fucking suck" angle with water bottles and the like and instead focus on "do we need a factory in China making 15,000,000 plastic trinkets for happy meals" or "does literally every single item for sale on the entire planet have to come in plastic wrapping", etc
Gourds were made from gourds back in the day. Or possibly ceramic.
We aren't really looking. In the most well known case we were able to identify they were killing salmon because the salmon were dieing and worked back from that, not because some study led there first.
https://www.ehn.org/toxic-tire-chemicals-threaten-salmon-as-...
That is a case of a specific chemical in tires, not microplastics generally, or even rubber tire particles generally.
Isn't [bad thing is happening] let's work backwards and find [difficult to find cause] a really solid approach?
Good when the damage is done, bad as a method of approving new chemicals.
I agree very strongly with intellectual humility. I just wish the microplastic fear mongerers would also take that lesson.
Given the track record of other things we introduced to the environment in mass quantities only to realize later were horrifyingly detrimental (CFCs and tetraethyl lead, etc) -- i think people are right that we should not take such a thing lightly
Not that it really matters, climate driven ecological collapse will probably make it irrelevant by the time it would matter
Beware of the confirmation bias, it works both ways. Reporting might be alarmist (it always is), actual research is largely not. This study doesn't discredit the entire field, it's pretty obvious that microplastics are everywhere and different types are harmful to an unclear extent, even if the amount might be overestimated in some studies.
>This type of research requires very little creativity or study design -- just throw a dart in a room and try and find microplastics in whatever it lands on. Boom, you get a grant for your study
Precisely, and mapping of that kind is entirely valid and required in huge amounts to have the full picture. Somebody has to do the grunt work.
Unfortunately too often authors of non alarmist research end up promoting alarmist interpretations of their work in science media.
Look up on fish and the consequences of microplastics on water animals. From starvation to sex change, microplastics wreak havoc there.
Just because you as a single consumer may not seem impacted by microplastics does not mean it's alarmism to suggest that it's a really bad phenomenon.
> Even the authors of this study go to great pains to not challenge the dogma that microplastics are existentially terrifying.
What great pains are they going through? The study is a discussion of measurement techniques and makes no comment on whether they are harmful because that’s irrelevant to the paper.
This could just as easily be a paper on how wearing the wrong type of gloves results in overestimating calcium in soil. You’re the one injecting a political agenda.
I’ll breathe tires a little easier today :)
Hey remember what happened with BPA? That was frustrating. We saw ostensibly legitimate concern, then manufacturers telling us they got rid of it. Maybe it would’ve inspired confidence if the removal adverts came with data sheets on the replacement chemicals.
It was largely replaced with it's molecular analog, BPS.
Just like BPA, BPS is an endocrine disruptor. The idea that it's less harmful than BPA is mostly due to lack of research.
Off the top of my head, wouldn't it be super easy to expose lab rats to microplastics and measure results?
No way this isn't heavily studies by now.
Edit: found a whole meta-study in like 30 seconds of searching: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/public-health/articles/...
There's a lot more to the linked study than this, but since I know a lot of people won't bother to click the link:
> Micro/nano-plastics negatively affected the blood glucose metabolism, lipid metabolism, and reproductive function in mice.
Peter Attia (I know, but I trust his ability to synthesize medical research) did a whole deep dive on this and IIRC determined that for the most part, it wasn't a big concern for anyone with remotely normal consumption patterns.
Good, glad human consumers are the only life on earth that could be affected
Testosterone is down by about half since 1970. (Unclear if related, but I think a bunch of these plastics are endocrine disruptors.)
Testosterone has not fallen. That idea is mainly a result of bad sampling and incomparable measurements. See: https://xcancel.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/19804871302092350...
Thanks, I'll have to take another look at it. Last I checked, the ~2000-2020 situation was unfortunately consistent with the previous trend.
Fallen or not, it may apparently be doubled, with great benefits to mental and physical health.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/-x6TKr35J9I
No affiliation, just thought this was extremely interesting. This seems to boil down entirely to nutrition, from what I gathered.
One could say that all living beings are made of naturally occurring microplastics, long before humans even existed. After all, where else did that oil in the ground come from?
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.
So basically the gloves that kitchen staff now must wear means we get an extra dose of micro plastics? Yikes.
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.
> I don't know why you think food service workers aren't constantly putting on new gloves...
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.
Yeah, but then something tells me they wouldn't be washing their hands instead. Which is the comparison being made.
> 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 think that because I was a food service worker and it's impossible to change gloves during a rush. Nitrile gloves and sweaty hands simply do not mix. There are also many more forms of cross contamination than just raw meat to cooked food.
If you don't have time to change gloves how do you have time to wash your hands?
It's much quicker to wash your hands.
Gloves require your hands to be perfectly dry to put on effectively.
I don't have the slightest idea what you're talking about.
You can dry your hands on a towel in seconds. I don't know what you mean by "perfectly dry"...? Like, nobody needs to blow-dry their hands before putting gloves on or anything.
I do a medical procedure several times a week that requires gloves.
If you don't flap your hands around for 30+ seconds, any remaining moisture from handwashing (or sweat) makes them stick to your skin and you wind up fighting them (and about half the time, ripping a hole). A towel is not enough.
I variously use nitrile, vinyl, and poly gloves when cooking messy things at home in bulk, like chicken, bacon, etc. I regularly pull them off to do something and then throw a new pair back on. They can be kinda sweaty and it's... fine. Zero problem whatsoever sliding on a new pair.
I'm not doubting your personal experience. I'm just saying it's in no way a universal rule. I'm sure experiences will be different depending on glove material, glove size, and just the different shapes of different people's hands.
But for me and for plenty of people I've worked with earlier in my life, swapping gloves was way faster and easier than washing hands again. Plus, washing your hands like 40 times in a shift is going to dry them out. It's not great.
> But for me and for plenty of people I've worked with earlier in my life, swapping gloves was way faster and easier than washing hands again. Plus, washing your hands like 40 times in a shift is going to dry them out. It's not great.
You and your former coworkers must have magic lubricating sweat or something. I have literally never encountered someone with this opinion before in my life. And I was a combat medic before I was a line cook, so I think I know a thing or two about gloves. Even in the medical field, there were times when medics skipped the gloves because they were treating their buddies under fire and the time to get gloves on wasn't worth it to them (for anyone unfamiliar, gloves in field medicine are mostly about protecting the provider, not the patient).
I think this might come down to sizing. Larger glove for hand size makes them easy to put on but hard to use for fine motor actions, whereas a well fitting glove makes any wetness on the hand a time sink. The stretchiness is the mechanism by which they both fit well and are hard to put on, but if you are willing to give up fit they don't need to stretch and you can just throw them on.
Many food service workers don't use gloves and don't wash their hands after going to the toilet, from what I have observed.
> 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.
> It's more than just procedure or habit, your hands feel dirty and you want to wash that off.
I'm not sure that's reliable across people. I'm definitely like that; whenever my hands feel the least bit dirty or oily or anything, I really want to wash them. But I've run into people who have commented on the fact that I do that, and I've learned that there are lots of people who just don't have that compulsion at all.
I agree that it's not reliable.
My point is that changing gloves is something that is even less reliable and needs to be drilled in through procedure and habit. Handwashing also needs the procedure and habit, but it has the added benefit that for a good number of people there's also a physical compulsion that goes along with that procedure and habit.
That's probably the places where people would never wash their hands either
Food safety regulations in most states require that food workers replace gloves if they handle raw meat and switch to other foodstuffs.
But they don't generally require them to replace gloves between batches of (the same kind of) meat, or between different kinds of vegetables, or when switching from vegetables to meat, or between customers if they're on a service line. While it's recommended in those situations, I'm not sure any state mandates it.
I mean, they don't require gloves to be replaced in those situations because there isn't a good safety reason to. There's zero reason to replace your gloves when switching from dicing green peppers for a salad to picking up raw chicken. Or similarly between customers if you're just handling food, and not a cash register or anything. It's not like you're touching the customers...
> There's zero reason to replace your gloves when switching from dicing green peppers for a salad to picking up raw chicken.
Typo?
No typo. That's the direction that's safe.
It seems you're thinking they're switching back and forth, but that's not what they wrote?
Just typical "programmer thinks they know how to do every job, especially the ones they've never done"
People also don't develop good habits and constantly touch their face with gloves. I worked with surgeons in the hospital and they would point this out. Equally important in a cleanroom.
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!"
Yeah, that's more the problem than anything else.
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.
Uh yea. That’s why most places use washed hands not gloves.
I’ve never seen for example sushi portrayed with anything but bare hands
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.
It says similar.
“ 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.
Stearates are considered very safe chemical compounds. They are derived from stearic acid which is one of the most common fatty acids and metal ions such as sodium and magnesium. Sodium stearate is a common soap and magnesium stearate is one of the most common additives in pharmaceuticals. This means that they are practically everywhere and but also easily digested in small amounts.
I'm still not aware of any reason to worry about micro plastics. As far as I know they seem harmless?
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.
Plastics aren't just plastic, unfortunately.
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.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030438942...
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Verla-Wirnkor-2/publica...
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.
>fearlessness
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...
Totally aligned.
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.
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.
>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.
That's why I said
>eliminating hair like fibres would also eliminate most of the sources of plastic
If you allow fibres they'd be 0.01% of fibres if you've got a dog anything like mine.
Dog, ha. Try a longhair cat. You'll be extracting balls of fur from most unexpected body cavities.
Thanks and noted, I'm happy to accept your figure. Even at 40% by number density that still means microplastics are hardly rare. I don't need to nitpick the exact number.
It was just an aside anyway. My main point is that MPs are vehicles for toxins, which addresses the original question about how (supposedly inert) microplastics can cause harm.
Thanks again for setting me straight, I must have misremembered.
It's good to keep in mind that there are a very broad range of figures. The Japan one was just the highest I could find with a quick search.
I like this study https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12302-019-0279-9 not so much because they give a definitive answer, but the provide a much better sense of the nuance that bold claims miss. It's too easy to make a bold claim of a number that seemingly contradicts another similarly bold claim. The nuanced approach can often reveal that both bold claims are, in fact, true but not meaningful because they lose significant context.
For example, a lot of reports on water use neglect locality of the use. What the term 'use' means (how much water does a hydroelectric dam use, is that the same sense of use as irrigation?), is there scarcity where it is used? Is it the same class of water as the water in demand (potable / brine / etc.)
The haphazard use of terms has resulted in an insane range of claims of water use per AI query (or lithium mined, or tomatoes grown). The lack of faith leads people to assume one party is lying, but often all of the numbers are accurate in a kind of way. Just not comparable and sometimes not even meaningful
I see you still don't say microplastics are rare. Violently agreeing with each-other, it seems. ;)
Synthetic textiles (clothes, upholstery, carpet, dryer exhaust, washer drainage) are of course the biggest culprits, with most of that trapped indoors with us, or co-located with human activity. If you have a dog that may change the mass fraction, but the MP exposure remains the same (or worse due to additional wear).
Road and tire wear is the other big contributor, again co-localized with population density. That's one of those nuanced cases, because a large fraction of the tire mass is actually natural rubber. The synthetic additives make it categorized as 100% plastic, but this may not accurately reflect reality in terms of the chemistry or hazard-based analysis.
Instant corrective upvote.
One of the sources of intentionally manufactured microplastics are known as porous polymers in fine mesh sizes.
This is over a $1 billion market and growing.
One of the pharmaceutical uses is precisely as a medium to deliver oral medications in a time-release way.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/porouspolymer-bead-real-world...
These porous polymer powders consist entirely of microscopic little sponges where they soak up and/or leach out all kinds of chemicals more so than the plain polymer, and with different affinity too.
However, even when common waste plastic particles themselves are not microscopically porous, different plastics soak up different chemicals to different degrees depending on what type of contact they come into. For instance kilos of polyethylene nurdles floating in the water will actually become "soaked" with some hydrocarbon liquids that are also floating or dissolved in the water. Even physically softened. These are very solid pea-sized beads that are not micro-sized plastics at all. They would have to degrade a whole lot before they fall into the micro category. And they are not manufactured to intentionally have a nano-porous structure like the finer mesh porous polymer powders.
Chemicals and plastics just don't go away so safely every time.
> So basically the gloves that kitchen staff now must wear [..]
Genuine question: we used to simply wash our hands well before preparing food.
At what point did the wearing of disposable gloves become "better"?
It's not better, it's a lazy shortcut so they have to wash their hands less and don't feel gross touching raw meat.
The stearates aren't microplastics, they aren't polymers, but they have chemical/spectroscopic similarity that results in them confusing the microplastics assays.
No. It means we get an extra dose of stearates and inaccurate science.
The gloves are not plastic.
In the article it explains that what they release are not microplastics
No: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47563392
How tricky the whole topic is
The transparent disposable food-service gloves are usually polyethylene so I wouldn't think they would have the exact same false-positive result as the nitrile gloves. Microscopic particles of stearates are what's on these nitrile gloves, not actual polymer dust or excess abrasive losses.
Maybe a different false-positive particle type in significant amounts is on the polyethylene ones ?
Pure stearates in micro amounts would be expected to be related to mild food-grade soaps, which do end up dissolving in water or oil and do not remain solid like a relatively immobile polymer particle would do.
This is good news, probably. We'll have to wait and see which studies replicate and which don't.
Lots of signal, lots of noise, and slowly figuring out which is which
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.
"Chemically very similar", as in "contains long hydrocarbon chains", something which even all biological matter (lipids) has. I've looked at a few microplastic studies and many of them use pyrolysis and mass spectroscopy to detect their presence, which is going to show almost the same results for animal fat as pure hydrocarbon plastics like PE (the most common plastic by production volume) and PP.
This study assumes everybody is oblivious to contamination, and explicitly says they can't differentiate. Not useful and bordering on the tautological
The non-trivial part isn't contamination per se, it's that the contaminant is chemically and spectroscopically similar enough to evade standard discrimination
"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. You'd also want to run samples with known and controlled micro-plastic concentrations. Why didn't they do this? Their results are utterly meaningless if they didn't.
That does seem like an oversight. We routinely run process blanks for elemental analysis at my job. I guess if the metal substrates had specifications on no particles you might skip this, obviously a big mistake if another step (ie. handling with gloves) introduced contamination.
In surface science the baggy clear polyethylene are widely known to be cleaner than other options.
Yeah, where is their control sample without any substrate on the sampler?
No substrate in the sampler means there would be nothing to test. Can't tell if you are joking.
So the takeaway is: we've been accidentally adding "microplastics" with the very gloves we use to avoid contamination. That's almost poetic
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.
I once worked in a meatball factory. I touched almost every single meatball with nitrile gloves. There's probably a lot of earlier process steps where humans are touching the food with gloves.
Did we also use the simple qualifying predicate "may cause" back when we were "certain"?
Reminds me of the story of Polywater. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywater
> a hypothesized polymerized form of water
With what chemical structure, even? That should have been the first red flag.
I had always assumed there was a methodological failure that kept getting replicated. There were enough articles like "scientists find microplastics at bottom of peat bog" that really made me dubious of the claims.
"Strong claims require strong evidence". Somehow it happens pretty regularly in academia that only one method becomes acceptable and any conflicting results get herded out on technical grounds.
I think it's partly deliberate and partly ignorance of chemistry. We are simply finding that biological matter is nearly indistinguishable from man-made microplastics.
the_plastic_detox documentary on netflix promotes the idea that microplastics cause infertility. this is based on 6 couples 90 days experiment.
they tracked levels of plastic-related chemicals and fertility markers. after plastic detox 3 out of 6 couples got pregnant.
the whole research process methodology, not just measurement, miss critical assessment
Only Heisenberg's uncertainty principle is not affected by the observer effect.
Also consider how many people have to wear them every day or close to. How much they interact with food and packages that most of us eventually touch. Food for thought.
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?
It wasn't an oversight? They sighted it immediately, hunted it down, then wrote it up for you.
The way this study was done makes perfect sense for finding this cross-contamination issue, but does not actually address how microplastics samples are extracted and found in sampling studies.
The below meta-study largely discusses sampling methods and protection from cross contamination so everyone here acting like this one study’s somehow invalidates decades of quality research:
>Due to the wide contamination of the environment with microplastics, including air [29], measures should be taken during sampling to reduce the contamination with these particles and fibers. The five rules to reduce cross-contamination of microplastic samples are: (1) using glass and metal equipment instead of plastics, which can introduce contamination; (2) avoiding the use of synthetic textiles during sampling or sample handling, preferring the use of 100% cotton lab coat; (3) cleaning the surfaces with 70% ethanol and paper towels, washing the equipment with acid followed by ultrapure water, using consumables directly from packaging and filtering all working solutions; (4) using open petri dishes, procedural blanks and replicates to control for airborne contamination; (5) keeping samples covered as much as possible and handling them in clean rooms with controlled air circulation, limited access (e.g. doors and windows closed) and limited circulation, preferentially in a fume hood or algae-culturing unit, or by covering the equipment during handling [15], [26], [95], [105], [107]. A fume hood can reduce 50% of the contamination [105] while covering samples during filtration, digestion and visual identification can reduce more than 90% of contamination [95].
So don’t ghost ride the whip about the death of the microplastic plague just yet.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016599361...
They found microplastics in the snow in Antarctica and in human embryos right? So this seems rather redundant.
ITT people that only read the headline.
While we are used to associate "the observer effect" with particle physics, it can appear in biology and/or chemistry as well.
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.
By that same effect we probably introduced life on Mars already.
It’s not improbable that some micro organism might have escaped the safety protocols. The likelihood it is still alive is low
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.
Studies are extremely difficult to get right. I'm generally a little bit skeptical of data for this reason.
A bit of a tangent but still on the subject of environmental pollution; the other day I found out that CO2 sensor sensitivity naturally drifts over time... So when a CO2 sensor is replaced for long term climate research, if they try to calibrate the new sensor to the old one at the time of replacement, the drift would be carried over into the new sensor even if no actual real change of CO2 occurred... Apparently there are standards to prevent this but mistakes have been identified multiple times with the methodology for setting that standard... Anyway measuring data accurately is really hard.
People do not appreciate correctness enough.
Nobody ran a control? It’s the most concept of experimentation.
How could you possibly know your analytical technique was valid if you don’t run a blank to see?
A rediscovery...six years later:
"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 do you say "nothing to see here" ? The existence of the earlier paper does not imply that procedures corrected for this afterwards. Is there any published protocol for a study since that first article that mentions avoiding stearate powder from gloves ?
Finally some good news.
Good news with a note:
> 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,”
And with some actual numbers, when digging in further:
> They found that on average, the gloves imparted about 2,000 false positives per millimeter squared area.
> 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 reason this is important is that one flawed dataset reports a hopeless situation; the other at least provides a “if we stop now” message.
Decades ago the only modern disposable gloves like these were "natural" latex which served medical professionals well but were miserably inadequate for chemical use. So nobody even thought about using them with aggressive industrial materials.
Nitrile emerged only as a specialty alternative to some of the earlier synthetic chemical-resistant compounds.
They were not disposable, more expensive than the earlier synthetic compounds, also not as thick a glove was needed so they gave you protection that was never available from anything but a much more clumsy alternative. Not nearly as tactile as the disposables though, that is their big redeeming feature.
One of the major weak points of nitrile is acetone, and things like MEK or ethyl acetate, which will soak into the polymer, swell, and weaken it. If you don't let them get too weak and shred them, they will shrink back after they dry out and are still fairly OK after that But nitrile is much better against most other solvents, acids, and alkalis though. Chlorinated solvents can be kind of rough too.
I was often the first one to use nitrile in some facilities, these ended up taking over and were the typical turquoise non-disposable ones that go about halfway up the forearm. Not the skin-tight "student models" that so many people use today. Now available in various colors :)
But these early "green" gloves alone were the same ones contributing to the stereotypical look of an environmental worker, where they can be even more scary when they sometimes add a complete tyvek suit with boots, hood, respirator, and the gloves with rubber bands around the sleeves, sampling the river water while you are fishing downstream :(
The ones like we used are $16 a pair now and were never cheap enough to be disposable. They actually last many months though. Only one other old guy uses them when I go back to my old lab, everyone else was "trained" on disposables now, each lab has a wall-mounted dispenser of various sizes like they have in hospitals. The "cost savings" are so well-realized so long ago that nobody knows it's completely false :\ People go through them like water, and it's still a shitshow when they try not to.
It's really worse from a contamination standpoint because people will still wear them for an hour or two during various chemical-handling events, but also do a little paperwork or keyboard typing with the gloves on, plus doorknobs and cabinet handles they are touching are much riskier than it used to be when disposables were not an option. Just because it's such a drag to peel them off and put on a new pair 10 minutes later.
Before disposables arrived, we used to have slightly oversized non-disposables, and throw them on & off & on many times per day, I still do. Plus I often wash the gloves while wearing them not much differently than washing my bare hands, mainly to get rid of chemicals using (very) hot soap & water or even using other strong solvents like heptane to rinse off heavier chemicals and oils. Probably about as particle-free as you can get except for what is floating around in the ambient air. Not like the skin-tight almost too-thin gloves people settle for now where they need to be peeled back off inside-out and thrown away each time.
By this point in the 21st century there are dedicated representatives of the glove manufacturers making high-touch sales calls, so there have got to be some bonuses that didn't exist that many decades ago.
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.
Well, it could mean more microplastics occur in an unnatural environment (the lab) containing much more plastics than in a typical home setting.
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
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).
Huh, good point
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).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stearic_acid
“if you read the article”
Now why would anyone do that when the headline already supports their uninformed opinion?
Called it!
> 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
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.
On the one hand, hundreds or perhaps thousands of studies might be wrong. On the other hand, this one might be wrong. Who's to say?
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.
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.
> 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?
You would, but if you do studies that claim that microplastics accumulate in our bodies or even in out brains it makes a difference.
I think you underestimate how much plastic is consumed in a lab doing experiments or analysis. I suspect it's an order of magnitude or two more than people are regularly exposed to at home or other non-industrial settings.
When I was an automation engineer at a lab, each liquid handler alone could go through several pounds of plastic pipette tips in a single day. All of that is made out of plastic and coated in a different thin layer of plastic to change the wettability of the tip. Even the glassware often comes coated in plastic and all these coatings are the thin layers most likely to create microplastics from abrasion (like the force of the pipette picking up the tip!). Throw all the packaging on top of that and there is just an insane amount of plastic.
The only place I've seen more plastic consumed is industrial and food manufacturing where everything is sprayed and resprayed with plastic coatings to reduce fouling.
> 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
So you're saying microplastics aren't a problem, because there's too much microplastics in gloves??
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.
I don't see anyone saying they aren't a problem.
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?
The article specifically says the opposite.
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 reject the scare quotes you're putting around the word vaccine.
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.
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.
Weaponized ignorance.
> Do your own assessment.
Yeah, and my primitive home-grown analysis then carries the same weight as those from experts with professional equipment? Oh come on...
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
> The world is too large, too complex, and too nuanced for the layman's opinion to be worth much.
This has a very, "Trust us, we're with the government." feel to it.
I enjoy Asimov's writing immensely but if you think quotations are some kind of mic drop, I'll leave you with this one.
"The question then is not whether or not a girl should be touched. The question is merely where, when, and how she should be touched" ― Isaac Asimov
I am right and I suspect you know it... you just don't like the way it makes you feel. Hence your focus on vibes and ad hominums rather than reason.
It is self evident that moderm science is too complex for the average person to understand, and fifty percent of us are less intelligent than even that.
> It is self evident that moderm science is too complex for the average person to understand, and fifty percent of us are less intelligent than even that.
I think you're grossly overestimating the complexity of most modern science outside of physics and mathematics (and computing, as an intersection of the two).
Good science is actually pretty easy to explain most of the time. It may take a long time to become a domain expert thst can perform novel research in a field but it it's well within the understanding of most people to have a single topic explained to them by an expert.
In fact, that very thing happens in courtrooms all the time.
Your condescending attitude is why people don't trust authorities and with good reason. If you can't help people understand science, it's you that doesn't understand it.
Furthermore, I hope you realize how close your "self-evident" logic is to a lot of extremely gross and genocidal ideologies of the past and present.
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.
A man who represents himself as a lawyer has a fool for a client. A man who "does his own research" has a fool for a researcher.
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.
[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.
> But science is about doing your own research!
Not for the average adult human on planet Earth, no.
Fifty percent of people are of below average intelligence. Of the 50% that remain only a fraction have access to the equipment necessary to replicate any given experiment, of that fraction only a small percentage will have the knowledge, skills, and abilities to accurately replicate any given experiment, of that tiny fraction only a much tinier fraction will have the KSA's to interpret those results in a meaningful way.
Science should replicate. That does not automatically imply that YOU should be the one replicating it.
For the average person science should mean knowing how to determine if someone is more qualified than they are and listening to them, or at least listening to the general consensus of those who are more qualified when such a consensus exists.
Yes, other peoples goals don't always align perfectly with yours, but the simple truth is that you aren't qualified or even capable of understanding everything in the world. When it comes to those subjects you must be adult enough to understand and work within your limitations.
Honestly, do you really believe that people who sacrificed large parts of their lives to become researchers are in it for the money, or out to get you? These are brilliant people who choose to take a career path that doesn't really pay well. When 99% of them tell you something is safe, Occam will tell that it's a pretty safe bet the weirdos on the fringe are just plain wrong.
There’s nothing wrong with doing your own experiments as long as you understand your limitations. But that’s not what people mean when they say they “did their own research”.
They mean that they went online and found blogs and YouTube videos that agree with whatever crackpot view they already held.
The issue with picking people and organizations to trust (which you absolutely should do) is that the average person isn’t even able to evaluate what qualified means. And RFK jr. is the guy appointing the “qualified people” who run things. On paper many of them are qualified, but in reality they’re crackpots.
You have to dig a level deeper and understand that this set of qualified people are actually just nuts who essentially performed the scientific equivalent of a coup because their ideas couldn’t win on merit.
> For the average person science should mean knowing how to determine if someone is more qualified than they
I agree. But how do you that without researching? Who makes the list of trustful institutions?
Let's pick homeopathy. The pharmacy in the corner of my home sells homeopathy too. There are even some curses in some universities [in Germany?] [I searched in MY university. Apparently there is no curse for human medicine, but there is a curse for veterinary https://www.fvet.uba.ar/?q=homeopatia .] Can we agree homeopathy is not real? How do you know?
This is all a very fun thought experiment and whatnot but the reality is the COVID vaccines went through gigantic randomized controlled trials, our absolute best known method (by a gigantic margin) to figure out what is true.
Those trials unequivocally showed extremely high effectiveness and extremely high safety.
The people who say otherwise are simply wrong in this case. No matter how much philosophizing you or they want to do on epistemology. If they want to demonstrate otherwise, they need to conduct their own trials, ideally large, randomized, blinded, placebo-controlled trials.
> in other cases they say that the "control group" is an unrelated bunch of guys in another city.
This is not how trials work and you should go "do your own research" on the basics of the methodology before you opine on higher-order things like vaccines etc.
>> in other cases they say that the "control group" is an unrelated bunch of guys in another city.
If you want to ruin your day, take a look at the hydroxychloroquine [retracted] paper by Raoult. Who is the control group? Why was it reported in the press as a 100% cure if the only death was in the trial group?
I agree that the trial to prove the effectiveness and safety of the covid-19 vaccines were much better designed. One of the reasons is that to get the approval of the FDA they must dot the i and j and cross the t and f.
To be fair, when the Covid vaccine was being rushed to be approved, I didn’t 100% trust that Trump wouldn’t pressure the FDA to approve without being confident it was safe.
So my standard at the time was that I’d take it if the FDA and at least one other developed country approved it.
Here in Argentina we approved the Sputnik vaccine. It was approved only here and in Russia. And here it was approved not by the standard office (ANMAT), but by a special resolution of the Health Ministry.
We could find it in Canada too (due to distribution it wasn't super common)
You are right https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_COVID-19_vaccine_autho... It was approved here for 3 year old kids. Perhaps that was the odd part.
The claim wasn’t it wasn’t tested but that it wasn’t tested for transmission prevention.
Still false
https://www.rmit.edu.au/news/factlab-meta/viral-pfizer--admi...
>> COVID vaccines are not even tested
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.]
Which reminds me, I need to arrange my biannual COVID booster.
Is it a only covid-19 booster or does it include a few of the other coronavirus floating around?
Just COVID-19. I do get other shots though, for example the annual flu shot and most recently an RSV shot (not the one I had participated in a clinical trial for.)
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.
I assure you, you do not have the background to properly assess the research.