Scientists Shocked To Find Lab Gloves May Be Skewing Microplastics Data (sciencedaily.com) 50
Researchers found that common nitrile and latex lab gloves can shed stearate particles that closely resemble microplastics, potentially "increasing the risk of false positives when studying microplastic pollution," reports ScienceDaily.
"We may be overestimating microplastics, but there should be none," said Anne McNeil, senior author of the study and U-M professor of chemistry, macromolecular science and engineering. "There's still a lot out there, and that's the problem." From the report: Researchers found that these gloves can unintentionally transfer particles onto lab tools used to analyze air, water, and other environmental samples. The contamination comes from stearates, which are not plastics but can closely resemble them during testing. Because of this, scientists may be detecting particles that are not true microplastics. To reduce this issue, U-M researchers Madeline Clough and Anne McNeil recommend using cleanroom gloves, which release far fewer particles.
Stearates are salt-based, soap-like substances added to disposable gloves to help them separate easily from molds during manufacturing. However, their chemical similarity to certain plastics makes them difficult to distinguish in lab analyses, increasing the risk of false positives when studying microplastic pollution. "For microplastics researchers who have these impacted datasets, there's still hope to recover them and find a true quantity of microplastics," said researcher and recent doctoral graduate Madeline Clough. "This field is very challenging to work in because there's plastic everywhere," McNeil said. "But that's why we need chemists and people who understand chemical structure to be working in this field."
The findings have been published in the journal Analytical Methods.
"We may be overestimating microplastics, but there should be none," said Anne McNeil, senior author of the study and U-M professor of chemistry, macromolecular science and engineering. "There's still a lot out there, and that's the problem." From the report: Researchers found that these gloves can unintentionally transfer particles onto lab tools used to analyze air, water, and other environmental samples. The contamination comes from stearates, which are not plastics but can closely resemble them during testing. Because of this, scientists may be detecting particles that are not true microplastics. To reduce this issue, U-M researchers Madeline Clough and Anne McNeil recommend using cleanroom gloves, which release far fewer particles.
Stearates are salt-based, soap-like substances added to disposable gloves to help them separate easily from molds during manufacturing. However, their chemical similarity to certain plastics makes them difficult to distinguish in lab analyses, increasing the risk of false positives when studying microplastic pollution. "For microplastics researchers who have these impacted datasets, there's still hope to recover them and find a true quantity of microplastics," said researcher and recent doctoral graduate Madeline Clough. "This field is very challenging to work in because there's plastic everywhere," McNeil said. "But that's why we need chemists and people who understand chemical structure to be working in this field."
The findings have been published in the journal Analytical Methods.
Re:Latex schmubs (Score:5, Informative)
Re: Latex schmubs (Score:5, Informative)
Actually - there is a very valid reason to throw previous results out of the window. In science, a contaminated sample completely invalidates the result. You can't rely on any findings built on false premises.
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Not really. These sorts of tests are all stochastic. Your prescription makes science sound binary, i.e., if one assumption is wrong, then it is all wrong. But one if one assumption is x .0095, when evaluating the gloves too means your assumption is x .0096. That means your numbers might need to be adjusted a bit, but, depending upon the math and model, it may not be a radical adjustment; just an adjustment at the margins.
Re: Latex schmubs (Score:2)
If the target of your scientific method is plastic pollution but your equipment distorts the measurement of the very core thing you're trying to measure, then no - no adjustments are ever going to be enough.
Especially with gloves, which would potentially directly touch the measured material. Over and over again.
If you can't see how problematic this situation is, then perhaps you should stay away from science.
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No, you just add a possible range for the result, or rather, that's what you would do if you had standard samples to manipulate with stearate coated gloves and run test after test against to see maximal and minimal levels of contamination when using said tools. Done correctly, this would let you know that anything above the maximum range is almost certain to be from actual plastics.
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Re: Latex schmubs (Score:4, Insightful)
Remember we're not talking about science here we're talking about public policy. So yeah the scientists can go ahead and redo all the experiments just to confirm the numbers and that's something scientists will want to do.
But we're not going to find all of a sudden that micro plastics are good for you. Neither are we going to find that they are in such low quantities that they aren't harmful. At best this is going to slightly skew the results.
But this isn't like radiometric dating where there are are all sorts of caveats because of how that science works. At the end of the day you've still got a brain full of plastic it's just potentially slightly less plastic.
But as usual just like when cigarettes were discovered to be killing people the plastic industry is going to hammer us with stories about this and slow down and the attempt at reform for at least another 50 years. And just like the cigarette industry, assuming our civilization survives what's happening right now that is, our grandchildren and great-grandchildren are going to look back at this time and say what the fuck was wrong with those people?
Trademark infringement! (Score:2)
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I like it. Hard to get it on the marquee, perhaps. Mine was a more prosaic "The Floyd Project". Welcome to the machine.
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Again I cannot emphasize this enough, the literal spoon's worth of plastic in your brain.
I really want to know the configuration of this AI and the base model it was built on, so I can identify it and avoid trusting or using it inadvertently
Go see The AI Doc. Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist. [youtube.com] so you'll know when to kiss your ass goodbye or not... [youtube.com]
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Not exactly, because the amount of stearates that came off the gloves would be fairly random, so there's no way to apply a general correction. You might not even know what kind of gloves they used in the experiment!
That doesn't mean you throw out the results, but you maybe mark those results and say there was potential factor unaccounted for and the results needs to be replicated.
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Re: Latex schmubs (Score:5, Informative)
The claim that "false premises invalidate everything built on them" only holds when the error is unrecoverable and propagates non-linearly.
But in many cases:
The error is consistent and quantifiable, so results can be recalibrated
The relational findings survive even if absolute values shift
The direction of effect holds even if the magnitude is off
A good counterexample of this is carbon dating. Early carbon dating used an assumed atmospheric C-14 ratio that turned out to be slightly wrong. The premise was false, but scientists didn't throw out decades of dating results. Instead, they developed calibration curves (using tree rings, coral, etc.) to correct the systematic offset.
Re: Latex schmubs (Score:2)
From my point of view the fundamental problem is that gloves probably come in contact with the tested substance a lot, and in an unpredictable pattern. After all, how much do you actually think about what and how you touch?
Sure, you could try to messure how much impact the gloves had and adjust results but you would need to develop an obscenely complex model outlining the million ways in which the gloves are used at every stage of the process. What surfaces they used, direct transmission, indirect transmiss
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Did you have a stroke writing this?
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I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. Are you saying that you don't believe the outcome because you incorrectly sumarised it in your head? That you don't believe the outcome because you didn't read TFS or TFA properly? Or that you just ignore everything and make up your own answers to suit what you think people were studying?
And media selection of alarmist data (Score:1)
Its like it does not matter how bad the reality of climate change is, the media will report the guy who says its even worse.
Then maybe the extreme prediction is debunked, so people stop worrying, when the reality is still very bad.
Are microplastics bad like asbestos, or just the latest in a long line of scares of the day, like aluminium saucepans or cholesterol?
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It sounds very much like you spend all your time reading The Daily Mail. In reality the "media" report on a very wide variety of results from a wide variety of people. Maybe a diet of less shock news can set you straight.
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I spend my time reading /. where we run stories such as that estimations of microplastics may be incorrectly overreported. Maybe the problem isn't the media but rather what you choose to commit to memory from it?
Yeah but The Guardian is alarmist trash right? They wouldn't ever run stories like this that say science is overreporting something https://www.theguardian.com/en... [theguardian.com] No sirree.
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It's just propaganda, not worth wasting time on.
Re:And media selection of alarmist data (Score:5, Interesting)
So, when we say microplastics, we really mainly mean nanoplastics - the stuff made from, say, drinking hot liquids from low-melting-point plastic containers. And yeah, they very much look like a problem. The strongest evidence [springer.com] is for cardiovascular disease. The 2024 NEJM study [nejm.org] for example found that for patients with above-threshold levels of nanoplastics in cartoid artery plaque were 4,5x more likely to suffer from a heart attack. Neurologically, they cross the brain-blood barrier (and quite quickly). A 2023 study found that they cause alpha-synuclein to misfold and clump together, a halmark of Parkinsons and various kinds of dementia. broadly, they're associated with [frontiersin.org] oxidative stress, neuroinflammation, protein aggregation, and neurotransmitter alterations. Oxidative stress is due to cells struggling to break down nanoplastics in them. They're also associated with [springer.com] immunotoxicity, inflammatory bowel disease, and reproductive dysfunction, including elevating inflammatory markers, impairing sperm quality, and modulating the tumor microenvironment. With respect to reproduction [sciencedirect.com], they're also associated with epigenetic dysregulation, which can lead to heritable changes.
And here's one of the things that get me - and let me briefly switch to a different topic before looping back. All over, there's a rush to ban polycarbonate due to concerns over a degradation product (bisphenol-A), because it's (very weakly) estrogenic. But typical effective estrogenic activity from typical levels of bisphenol-A are orders of magnitude lower than that of phytoestrogens in food and supplements; bisphenol-A is just too rare to exert much impact. Phytoestrogens have way better PR than bisphenol-A, and people spend money buying products specifically to consume more of them. Some arguments against bisphenol-A focus on what type of estrogenic activity it can promote (more proliferative activity), but that falls apart given that different phytoestrogens span the whole gamut of types of activation. Earlier research arguing for an association with estrogen-linked cancer seems to have fallen apart in more recent studies. It does seem associated with PCOS, but it's hard to describe it as a causal association, because PCOS is associated with all sorts of things, including diet (which could change the exposure rate vs. non-PCOS populations) and significant hormonal changes (which could change the clearance rate of bisphenol-A vs. non-PCOS populations). In short, bisphenol-A from polycarbonate is not without concern, but the concern level seems like it should be much lower than with nanoplastics.
Why bring this up? Because polycarbonate is a low-nanoplastic-emitting material. It is a quite resilient, heat tolerant plastic, and thus - being much further from its glass transition temperature - is not particularly prone to shedding nanoplastics. By contrast, its replacements - polyethylene, polypropylene, polyethylene terephthate, etc - are highly associated with nanoplastic release, particularly with hot liquids. So by banning polycarbonate, we increase our exposure to nanoplastics, which are much better associated with actual harms. And unlike bisphenol-A, which is rapidly eliminated from the body, nanoplastics persist. You can't get rid of them. If some big harm is discovered with bisphenol-A that suddenly makes the risk picture seem much bigger than with nanoplastics, we can then just stop using it, and any further harm is gone. But we can't do that with nanoplastics.
People seriously need to think more about substitution risks when banning products. The EU in p
Re:And media selection of alarmist data (Score:5, Interesting)
A bit more about the latter. Beyond organophosphates, the main other alternative is pyrethroids. These are highly toxic to aquatic life, and they're contact poisons to pollinators just landing on the surface (some anti-insect clothing is soaked in pyrethrin for its effect). Also, neonicotinoids are often applied as seed coatings (which are taken up and spread through the plant), which primarily just affect the plant itself. Alternatives are commonly foliar sprays. This means drift to non-target impacts as well, such as in your shelterbelts, private gardens, neighbors' homes, etc. You also have to use far higher total pesticide quantities with foliar sprays instead of systematics, which not only drift, but also wash off, etc. Neonicotinoids can impact floral visitors, with adverse sublethal impacts but e.g. large pyrethroid sprayings can cause massive immediate fatal knockdown events of whole populations of pollinators.
Regrettable substitution is a real thing. We need to factor it in better. And that applies to nanoplastics as well.
But what are the holistic epidemiological trends? (Score:2)
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To summarise then (Score:5, Insightful)
I see (Score:2)
"We may be overestimating microplastics, but there should be none," said Anne McNeil, senior author of the study and U-M professor of chemistry, macromolecular science and engineering. "There's still a lot out there, and that's the problem."
"Our science was actually really screwed up, but that doesn't matter, because our conclusions are still right, because we already knew the right answer."
What's wrong with me doc ?! (Score:3)
"You have broken your finger."
Seriously, that is some shit lab practice. Did a self-proclaimed scientist looking for plastics not even consider what their gloves were made of ?!
What about checking a null control sample first ?!
Re:What's wrong with me doc ?! (Score:5, Informative)
Sure it's bad, but not like you are saying. They are not getting any latex in their samples (and they probably checked that from the beginning). They are saying that the powder that keeps the gloves from sticking together, which is not plastic and they knew was not plastic, can register as plastic in some of their machines.
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Sure it's bad, but not like you are saying. They are not getting any latex in their samples (and they probably checked that from the beginning). They are saying that the powder that keeps the gloves from sticking together, which is not plastic and they knew was not plastic, can register as plastic in some of their machines.
So, re-calibrate and/or re-train the machines then. This might be advanced, but is not rocket science along the lines of creating warp drives.
Last report I heard about the microplastic problem found microplastics in the testicles of one-hundred percent of the men tested. Yes. We still have a problem with microplastics no matter how hard the plastic pimps want to create clickbait suggesting that microplastics aren't nearly bad enough to ban them from collecting addictions, private islands, and yachts.
Yes.
Meh. It still proves the hypothesis (Score:4, Informative)
Microplastics are everywhere. And at least they fessed up and now they'll improve their method. That is good science.
More than you can expect from anti climate change research funded and biased by the Big Oil Barony.
The chimps go, "drill baby drill" and set fire to their furniture for a light source.
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Did you read the article ?
"The researchers emphasize that this does not mean microplastics are not a real problem.
"We may be overestimating microplastics, but there should be none," said McNeil, senior author of the study and U-M professor of chemistry, macromolecular science and engineering, and the Program in the Environment. "There's still a lot out there, and that's the problem."
And your qualification to comment is your ability to bang two rocks together?
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Actually, both kinds of science are playing fast and loose with facts, to prove their point of view.
The microplastics people start with the assumption that microplastic is bad, then perform experiments that exaggerate or skew both the presence and the impact of microplastics.
The climate deniers likewise start with an assumption that climate change is a hoax, then perform experiments or analysis that skews the data to "prove" their point.
Not the first time... (Score:4, Informative)
There were articles about the amount of microplastics in human blood and tissue. Then they discovered that some of the lab equipment had plastic parts that contaminated the samples.
tl;dr: When you're measuring tiny particles in tiny amounts, contamination is very, very difficult to avoid.
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> How exactly are we going to do that?
Kill all humans, I guess.
You have to understand that we live under a death cult which wants to destroy all sentient life on the planet. Pushing for "there must be none" is one way to do that, because once we shut down oil, nuclear and plastics 90% of the population die and the other 10% spend the rest of their lives fighting each other for food and shelter.
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I wish that I could.
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How exactly are we going to do that?
That statement is not logical, it is evangelical.
Plastics are an incredibly important, irreplaceable part of our world. If they disappeared, the effect would be catastrophic.
Do I want to be drinking and eating tons of microplastics? No. That seems fucking stupid.
Should be Zero though is the statement of a person doing damage control to push a narrative that might be endangered by a new fact.
This is not even saying that the new measurements will put us at low numbers. It might not.
Anne McNeil here though is worried that the data might make this mountain into a mole hill and running pre interference. That is not science. That is activism.
The chemist's statement is logical, and clinical.
COMPARE WITH:
"We found three tons of nicotine in human brain tissue. That's awful! We know that nicotine is a toxin. [time passes] It turns out our data about the level of nicotine in brain tissue was overstated. But (we know that nicotine is a toxin so) there should be none in the brain."
"We found 3kg of Cesium-137 in human brain tissue. That's awful! We know that radioactive isotopes are highly destructive to animal life. [time passes] It turns out our data
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To make her statement illogical, you would need to have evidence to invalidate any studies that established a causative link between the presence of plastics in animal tissue and an increase in disease/mortality.
No. To make it illogical, all I would have to do is to show that the only way to get to zero is to get rid of plastics. That getting rid of plastics would result in disease, famine and plague, and wipe out a large part of humanity. That is how you get to ZERO.
Thinking that this is a number that should be aimed for is retarded. We should care about the levels. We should care about where in the body we find it and we should care about finding out what levels cause what problems.
More facts, more science, le
Brawndo!!! (Score:3)
More proof that global warming is a scam! (Score:2)
There should be none? (Score:2)
"We may be overestimating microplastics, but there should be none."
What is the basis for this claim?
We live in a dirty world. There are contaminants everywhere. They are literally unavoidable.
ZERO is never a good threshold. Every toxin has a threshold above which it is toxic. Microplastics is no exception.