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.
Interestingly, contamination of the forensic equipment was considered early on already. However, due to the geographic area of the findings and initial negative control tests using fresh swabs, they ruled it out.
That's incredible. Though the effect of this will be claims that microplastics don't exist while no one in that case claimed that murders didn't happen. Happy to have learned about an interesting historical oddity either way.
“ 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.
> 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.
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?
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.
So the problem is these particles are literally flying off the gloves of the scientists wearing them to the point it's interfering with the experiment and so... it's less of a problem?
No, the gloves leave stearates (not plastic, but similar looking particles) residue on contact. So there are not literally micro plastics flying off the gloves. Read the article.
It's not microplastics coming from the gloves. It's particles of the powder used to coat the gloves and keep them from sticking. Different composition, but similar and easily mistaken.
If you read the article you'd find that what they are finding are not microplastics - they're stearates[1]
These are soap-like chemicals used as mould release agents on gloves, but what also means are chemically similar to plastics when analyzed by some techniques and under a microscope will spontaneously form micelle-structures which look very similar to microplastics (you can't exactly get in there and poke them).
Yes? Most people don’t live their entire lives in a lab wearing nitrile gloves, so there’s an argument to be made that the concentration of microplastics found in that setting is not reflective of everyday life.
So, not that microplastics don’t exist, but that they don’t exist to the same degree as in a lab environment.
I wouldn't be surprised if e.g. all these paper-thin synthetic (plastic) disposable parts and fabrics used in labs shed microplastics way more than e.g. synthetic fabrics designed to be survive a machine wash a few dozen times, or upholstery meant to withstand tens of thousands of sitting cycles, nevermind solid plastics (e.g. reusable food containers, furniture surfaces).
> The authors acknowledge funding from the College of Literature, Science, and Arts at the University of Michigan. R. L. P. was supported by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship (NSF-GRFP) DGE-2241144. M. E. C. was partially supported by the University of Michigan Rackham Graduate School through a merit and predoctoral fellowship. The authors would like to acknowledge the professors and students of the Mapping, Measuring, and Modeling Microplastics in the Atmosphere of Michigan team for their support and helpful discussions. The authors thank Jennifer Connor, Curtis Refior, Amy Pashak, Megan Phillips, Josh Hubbard, Bill Joyce, and David Lee for their community partnership. The authors would also like to thank former Dean Anne Curzan from the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts at the University of Michigan for funding this work through the “Meet the Moment” grant program. The authors acknowledge technical support from the Michigan Center for Materials Characterization.
Is there anything wrong here? Not sure I understood your comment
> The authors acknowledge funding from the College of Literature, Science, and Arts at the University of Michigan. R. L. P. was supported by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship (NSF-GRFP) DGE-2241144. M. E. C. was partially supported by the University of Michigan Rackham Graduate School through a merit and predoctoral fellowship.
In the acknowledgements section. However, after reviewing it, I’m not sure what or who I should be looking for, so I’m not entirely sure what the OP is hinting at.
At first glance, nothing appears suspicious, though I should note that I’m not familiar with any of the authors and haven’t looked into them further.
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.
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.
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.
IIRC they have a 95% reduction in hospitalization rate, measured in a double blind human trial. [Compare that with the vector virus and inactivated virus vaccines, that have like a 65% reduction in hospitalization rate, measured in a double blind human trial.]
We have more data on COVID vaccines that nearly every drug in existence.
My wife was one of the first pregnant women to get the vaccine (outside of trials) because she’s an ER doctor, and she’s had regular follow-up surveys from the CDC for years.
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.
There is a “case files” podcast on it that I found quite good.
https://casefilepodcast.com/case-178-the-woman-without-a-fac...
“ 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.
> To be honest, after reading some of these microplastics papers I'm starting to suspect most of them are bullshit. Plastics are everywhere in a modern lab and rarely do these papers have proper controls, which I suspect would show that there is a baseline level of microplastic contamination in labs that is unavoidable. Petri dishes, pipettes, microplates, EVERYTHING is plastic, packaged in plastic, and cleaned using plastic tools, all by people wearing tons of synthetic fibers.
> We went through this same nonsense when genetic sequencers first became available until people got it into their heads that DNA contamination was everywhere and that we had to be really careful with sample collection and statistical methods. [1]
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40681390
It took years to figure out proper methods and many subfields have their own adjusted procedures and sometimes even statistical models. At least with DNA you could denature it very effectively, I’m not sure how they’re going to figure out the contamination issue with microplastics.
I can't imagine wafting your hands over the tubes would change the plastic amounts substantially compared to whatever negative controls the papers used. But again, I am not an expert on this kind of analytical chemistry. I always worry more about batch effects. But it does seem like microplastics are becoming the new microbiome.
But as mentioned elsewhere in the thread, everyone knows that it's possible and take measure to mitigate it.
A paper that said those mitigations were insufficient or empirically found not to work would be interesting. A paper saying "you should mitigate this" is... not very interesting.
From the article:
> They found that on average, the gloves imparted about 2,000 false positives per millimeter squared area.
I dunno, that seems like a lot of false positives. Doesn’t that strongly imply that overestimation would be a pretty likely outcome here? Sounds like a completely sterile 1mm^2 area would raise a ton of false positives because of just the gloves.
Then the tested result is Actual Sample Result - Negative Sample Result.
So you'd expect a microplastic sample to have 2,000 plus N per mm^2, and N is the result of your test.
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.
If you're around plastic a lot you're ingesting a lot and if you're not, you're not.
So the conclusion would be that plastics "sheds" and you should avoid it in packaging, kitchen utensils, etc
These are soap-like chemicals used as mould release agents on gloves, but what also means are chemically similar to plastics when analyzed by some techniques and under a microscope will spontaneously form micelle-structures which look very similar to microplastics (you can't exactly get in there and poke them).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stearic_acid
Now why would anyone do that when the headline already supports their uninformed opinion?
So, not that microplastics don’t exist, but that they don’t exist to the same degree as in a lab environment.
Why was the study funded through the humanities department?
Is there anything wrong here? Not sure I understood your comment
> The authors acknowledge funding from the College of Literature, Science, and Arts at the University of Michigan. R. L. P. was supported by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship (NSF-GRFP) DGE-2241144. M. E. C. was partially supported by the University of Michigan Rackham Graduate School through a merit and predoctoral fellowship.
At first glance, nothing appears suspicious, though I should note that I’m not familiar with any of the authors and haven’t looked into them further.
It is generally bad practice to so drastically twist somebody’s words to make them say the opposite of what they’re saying. Carl Sagan would not agree with you.
Yeah, and my primitive home-grown analysis then carries the same weight as those from experts with professional equipment? Oh come on...
This is a very scientific way of thinking. It's only gotten a bad rap on account of people using it to attack others' research and then(crucially) failing to perform their own.
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.
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.]
Still false
https://www.rmit.edu.au/news/factlab-meta/viral-pfizer--admi...
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.