Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What is our hidden consumption of microplastics doing to our health?

nautil.us

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 341 posts

Re: What is our hidden consumption of microplastics doing to our health?

#101

Post by the_sleaze9 »

mr-wendel wrote: post #72
pcthrowaway wrote: post #16

Quoted post unavailable.

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…

As a parent in the thick of babies exactly at this age and surrounded by other parents in the same situation, I cannot tell the difference between a "covid" baby and any other.

What I can tell you is how much time and effort the parents are putting into the baby, and whether is home-schooled or goes to school/daycare.

First child? They're probably walking early. Third kid? They'll be pushing a year and a half old with barely 5 words in their repertoire and I'll consider them lucky if they can hold themselves upright using a chair for support.

The parents with 3 young kids just don't have the bandwidth to provide the kind of attention that the baby needs.

I essentially think about it this way - consider how much information AlphaGo has to learn with. Now consider how much information your brain processes with only your vision. You think there's gonna be a statistically relevant causation because there's a piece of fabric on the adult's face?

I can't say for certain, but from my daily sampling it's much less than you intuitively would think. Kids are resilient and motivated to learn.

Re: What is our hidden consumption of microplastics doing to our health?

#102

Post by wil421 »

jacquesm wrote: post #95
wil421 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yes, at the um scale and below it does happen, and such concentrating effects can really change it from a non-issue to a serious problem, depending on how chemically active the contaminant is. 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 m…

The article specifically says micrometer so it would be right between millimeter and nano sized plastics. They will only get smaller as they degrade.

> Our results provide evidence in support of submicrometre- and micrometre-sized polystyrene and polymethylmethacrylate particles penetrating the stele of both species using the crack-entry mode at sites of lateral root emergence.

Re: What is our hidden consumption of microplastics doing to our health?

#103

Post by usrn »

AstralStorm wrote: post #61

The plastics themselves are only part of the story - they are relatively inert. However chemicals used to plasticize them and prevent fire are not, and some of them are already banned, but we have insufficient days on the replacements used. (Phenolics such as Bisphenol A - have hormonal effects causing direct cancer risk. And other effects too.)

I think it depends on the plastic. "Plastic" just refers to a mechanical property that a lot of different polymers have.

Re: What is our hidden consumption of microplastics doing to our health?

#104

Post by danShumway »

swayvil wrote: post #98
danShumway wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> In a hundred million years of biological history, I doubt that there is anything as perverse as voluntarily blocking your own breathing hole

Really? You genuinely can't think of anything in the entire history of humanity more perverse that someone could do than wear a mask? Have you spent much time on the Internet? And historically -- I mean, I'm just throwing out one idea off the top of my head, but how about public executions in the Colosseum for entertainment purposes?

This is pretty silly. :)

Even if you do somehow think that mask-wearers are all perversely deriving some pleasure from suffocating themselves and that they're walking around unable to breathe, there's still no way you genuinely believe that auto-erotic asphyxiation is the most perverse thing that society has ever invented.

Re: What is our hidden consumption of microplastics doing to our health?

#105

Post by twofornone »

>bisphenol A mimics the hormone estrogen and can lead to damage in sperm development.19 Further research has shown that microplastics, and not just those with bisphenol A, can cause damage to the testes and lead to the production of deformed sperm cells that have a harder time reaching eggs.

I'd more interested in hearing what microdosing xenestrogens on a large scale does to our collective psychology. I think this is an extremely important but understudied effect. Much like birth control, which is known to influence decision making and behavior, and probably affects collective behaviors like vote outcomes and such.

I have a haunch that a number of modern western ills are influenced by or rooted in the psychological influence of BC hormones. We know [0] that fertile women have different preferences in men, different risk tolerance, and different social behavior (increased mate seeking)...imagine what dosing tens of millions of women does to a country's politics? Now imagine dosing the entire population with chemicals that mimic estrogen...

0. https://magazine.tcu.edu/fall-2020/hormonal-birth-control-br...

Re: What is our hidden consumption of microplastics doing to our health?

#106

Post by tomthe »

palijer wrote: post #66
tomthe wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't take anyone seriously who publishes a pie-chart like this: https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S03043894203199...

That seems a rather arbitrary trait to dismiss a researcher for. It is possible to be correct with flawed design choices.

Yes, you are of course right. One shouldn't dismiss good work because of some flaws. But anyway... this is a rather silly pie chart and I wonder how this was able to pass through multiple authors and peer-review.

Re: What is our hidden consumption of microplastics doing to our health?

#107

Post by 2Gkashmiri »

sva_ wrote: post #92
2Gkashmiri wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I also switched to "Himalaya" (Pakistani) salt, hoping that is low in microplastics.

yep. the exact same thing. i get to buy them in huge 5 Kg rocks because its just a few hundred km away but that is the reason.

Re: What is our hidden consumption of microplastics doing to our health?

#108

Post by Robotbeat »

toss1 wrote: post #99
Robotbeat wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The article specified that all masks tested other than KN95 masks produced more microplastics than they filtered out (it didn't mention if they tested surgical masks). 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.

Oh, agreed, there. KN-95 masks are the only types I’ve been using for over a year, so I just kind of assumed that. Many cloth masks do very little so I wouldn’t be surprised if they actually make it worse.

Re: What is our hidden consumption of microplastics doing to our health?

#109

Post by slim »

palijer wrote: post #66
tomthe wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't take anyone seriously who publishes a pie-chart like this: https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S03043894203199...

That seems a rather arbitrary trait to dismiss a researcher for. It is possible to be correct with flawed design choices.

that pie chart to the left is not poor design choice. it demonstrates actual incompetency.

Re: What is our hidden consumption of microplastics doing to our health?

#110

Post by User23 »

palijer wrote: post #66
tomthe wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't take anyone seriously who publishes a pie-chart like this: https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S03043894203199...

That seems a rather arbitrary trait to dismiss a researcher for. It is possible to be correct with flawed design choices.

Honestly communicating your results is just as important as getting good ones, and a junk chart like that is at best gratuitously confusing.

I'd say everyone should have to read Edward Tufte, but everyone has and it didn't much help. 90% of the Q&A at his seminars is people asking questions that are variants of "but I'm used to doing it the old bad way, so isn't that really just as good?"[1] It was mildly amusing watching Mr. Tufte grow increasingly exasperated realizing just how few of his students had learned anything from the experience. I imagine that was a big part of why he retired to become a sculptor.

[1] My personal pet peeve is the obsession designers appear to have with ensuring that there are no visible indications of which part of their design is meant to be clicked on.

Post reply on HN