91–100 of 341 posts
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I can't take anyone seriously who publishes a pie-chart like this: https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S03043894203199...
Is that because the "Consumables ingested" on the right side looks like Pac-Man eating the other two categories?
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…
nice. >In these scenarios (0.15g and 0.3g) about 90% they estimate comes from salt. 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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Plants are reasonably good at filtering the water they ingest through their roots, if they weren't your tomatoes would be full of sand and mud (clay).
Plants uptake chemicals and other smaller molecules through their roots. Oftentimes they will store pollutants in their fruit or stems because they don’t know what to do with it. Here’s an article from Nature that specifically studied plastic uptake by plant roots.[1] [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-020-0567-9
TFA: "Yet despite all the new knowledge about microplastics and the even tinier nanoplastics, smaller than a millimeter, that enter the human body through ingestion or inhalation"
Microplastics are apparently taken as being a mm or larger, and 'nanoplastics' are anything smaller than a mm which is still very large. The ones you are talking about would be very much smaller than those by another 3 orders of decimal magnitude.
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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 have one friend who absolutely swears that "covid babies" are a thing, and that you can spot them from across the room. 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…
I can also spot a Trump baby across the room, which is obviously totally different than a Biden baby. I'll take the liberty of not revealing my meaning either, of course.
I haven't personally gotten the equipment to do actual measurements yet, but I keep pet rats and they have pretty fragile respiratory systems, and anecdotally when I put together a Corsi Rosenthal Box[0] and stuck it next to their cage their allergies/sneezing pretty much entirely vanished.
I still need to get air quality measuring equipment and more objectively confirm that it's working, but the research I have read suggests that spending ~$100 to put together a DYI box with good MERV13 filters or higher will solidly outperform the majority of commercial consumer-grade air purifiers out there. And subjectively, I do notice a difference in air quality, although that could be a placebo effect.
Regular vacuuming will also help a lot with dust and micro-particles, but that's a lot more work than just plugging in a box fan.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corsi%E2%80%93Rosenthal_Box
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Mask-wearing is like foot-binding and leeching. Pathological and perverse, perhaps. But also totally cool and in agreement with the experts. It's a window into our psychology. Anthropologists of the future will reap much research papers.
> Pathological and perverse, perhaps. But also totally cool and in agreement with the experts. Um... "perverse"? I have a lot less patience for these takes than I used to because at least early on in the pandemic people could convincingly claim that wearing a mask was "cool". There was at least truth to the idea that you would be shamed for not wearing a mask. But that's not the situation anymore -- GP wrote a commen…
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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.
The form matters. The plastic in masks is not inhalable, and in all likelihood wearing a mask reduces inhaled plastics like it reduces inhaling of any other solid.
This is not a bad result, since if you want to filter out viruses to protect the wearer (vs minimize general transmission), the N95/KN95 masks are the only ones worth wearing.
Quality matters, all items in a category are not the same.
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> Pathological and perverse, perhaps. But also totally cool and in agreement with the experts. Um... "perverse"? I have a lot less patience for these takes than I used to because at least early on in the pandemic people could convincingly claim that wearing a mask was "cool". There was at least truth to the idea that you would be shamed for not wearing a mask. But that's not the situation anymore -- GP wrote a commen…
In a hundred million years of biological history, I doubt that there is anything as perverse as voluntarily blocking your own breathing hole. It's right up there with crowds throwing themselves off cliffs and maniacs walking down the sidewalk chattering at their plastic rat.
Ok. Well thanks for removing all doubt here at least.