Hacker News

>> I'm amazed that wasn't taken into account!

This was taken into account: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47563392

> 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...

Plot twist: the woman making the DNA collection swabs was the serial killer.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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/...

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.

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.

Lots of signal, lots of noise, and slowly figuring out which is which

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.

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.

> 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"?

The stearates aren't microplastics, they aren't polymers, but they have chemical/spectroscopic similarity that results in them confusing the microplastics assays.

In the article it explains that what they release are not microplastics

How tricky the whole topic is

No: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47563392

The non-trivial part isn't contamination per se, it's that the contaminant is chemically and spectroscopically similar enough to evade standard discrimination

> a hypothesized polymerized form of water

With what chemical structure, even? That should have been the first red flag.

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?

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.

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,”

By that same effect we probably introduced life on Mars already.

It wasn't an oversight? They sighted it immediately, hunted it down, then wrote it up for you.

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 ?

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?

> Plastics are everywhere in a modern lab and rarely do these papers have proper controls, which I suspect would show that there is a baseline level of microplastic contamination in labs that is unavoidable. Petri dishes, pipettes, microplates, EVERYTHING is plastic, packaged in plastic, and cleaned using plastic tools, all by people wearing tons of synthetic fibers.

Maybe so, but plastics are also everywhere in our daily lives, including on the food we eat and in the clothes we wear. As we speak I just took some eggs out of a plastic carton, unwrapped some cheese from plastic wrap, and got oatmeal out of a plastic bag. The socks and pants I'm wearing are made of polyester.

If plastics cause contamination in a lab, would you not also expect similar contamination outside of the lab?

> That’s not to say that there is no microplastics pollution, the U-M researchers are quick to say. > > “We may be overestimating microplastics, but there should be none. There’s still a lot out there, and that’s the problem,”

shouldn't you be particularly attentive to your bias then? an article came out that _seems_ to confirm your previous belief that you arrive at without really testing? like everyone itt that is looking like the comments of an steven crowder comment section in a post about climate change

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.

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 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.

The article specifically says the opposite.

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.

Weaponized ignorance.

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.

> 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...

I assure you, you do not have the background to properly assess the research.