81–90 of 341 posts
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I've seen memes showing a news headline "doctors baffled by microplastic in human lungs", juxtaposed with an unrelated headline that mentions face masks are made of the same plastic.
A startup selling probiotics containing plastic-eating bacteria, anyone?
As long as you don't spill any and wake up tomorrow with all the plastic in your house eaten.
How much glass do I consume? Or is glass, dust, whatever - any different from plastics?
Well, SiO2 is pretty different from plastic, chemically speaking. And I would expect that we inhale several grams of fine sand dust per week too. In other words, the amount of "glass" entering your body because you drank a beer is probably irrelevant compared to e.g. Sahara dust (if you're in Europe) in the air around you.
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My concern is with all the infants. Being able to gawk out and stare at all the many faces you see, and how they respond to you has got to be foundational to your discovery of the world. If had to place a bet on a major "net negative" I'm going all in on this. I have one friend who absolutely swears that "covid babies" are a thing, and that you can spot them from across the room. I haven't yet figured out what that m…
Infant eyesight is not good for distance; their perception is also in its infancy (their eyes detect photons but their brains are still learning to interpret the signals); their attention is correlated more strongly to sound than vision because sound is what they get in the womb.
I mention strangers because the immediate caregivers of infants were generally not wearing masks around them most of the time even during the depths of the pandemic.
Your friend is most likely engaged in motivated reasoning via confirmation bias; they are seeing what they expect and want to see. Infants in general often look spaced out or alarmed. Their facial expressions should not be taken to infer internal emotional state comparable to what an adult feels. Infant brains don’t yet work like adult brains.
In addition, it’s not like COVID-19 is the first time human babies have been exposed to masks. Mask-wearing in public has been normal in some Asian cultures for decades, and of course some Muslim women cover their faces at all times outside the home.
The actual study is here https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030438942... The study presents three scenarios assuming different assumptions about the mass of plastic particles. In the worst case scenario, where I think the assumptions are bad, they estimate 5g of plastic per week. In the other two scenarios which used more complex but more realistic modelling they estimate 0.15 and 0.3g of plastic cons…
for a few years now we have switched to rock salt completely at home. it's like 20-40% more expensive and we have to use a hammer/grinder every month or so but we are doing that.
by reducing say 90% of the microplastics, is that.. good?
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My concern is with all the infants. Being able to gawk out and stare at all the many faces you see, and how they respond to you has got to be foundational to your discovery of the world. If had to place a bet on a major "net negative" I'm going all in on this. I have one friend who absolutely swears that "covid babies" are a thing, and that you can spot them from across the room. I haven't yet figured out what that m…
I also grew up in the era where you were never ever supposed to use your real name or upload pictures of your face to the internet, and have absolute disdain for this weird webcam culture where people insist on seeing each-other's faces while interacting with them.I think the rise in racism and other forms of hatred on the internet ties directly to the increase in people making photographs of themselves central to their identity. I'm actually kind of hoping her generation grows up with less emphasis on appearance. Maybe we have a couple years here with a few less narcissists. Only good things can come out of such developments IMO.
This article conflates particles of any size, and often does not even mention sizes, e.g., '28 particles' in a serving of beer? That is imprecise (doesn't mention size) and wrong: probably way to little, as nano particles are used in filtering (clarifying) beer. The articles also doesn't really tell me how to avoid all that plastic. If 40 percent of human diet contains plastic, then there's hope, so which 60 percent…
Personally, I think that in answer to the question of “how to avoid all that plastic?”, the article is leaning more towards “take action to stop the plastic from being produced and added to food in the first place”. While it makes the problem larger from an individual perspective, the alternative of simply trying to avoid it in our own foods would mean that our available foods shrink over time as plastics continue to…
Which is kind of nonsense unless someone happens to be CEO of Molson Coors or something. It seems obvious that if you want to avoid ingesting plastic, the clearest path to that is to know what foods are less likely to contain plastic in the first place.
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My concern is with all the infants. Being able to gawk out and stare at all the many faces you see, and how they respond to you has got to be foundational to your discovery of the world. If had to place a bet on a major "net negative" I'm going all in on this. I have one friend who absolutely swears that "covid babies" are a thing, and that you can spot them from across the room. I haven't yet figured out what that m…
I don't dismiss this out of hand, it is at least somewhat plausible to me that less facial exposure might impact infant development. However, I can also probably spot a covid baby at least somewhat reliably across the room, because I'd just look for any baby that's seems like they're less than 2-3 years old, so I'm not certain that being able to do so reveals very much.