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So the problem is these particles are literally flying off the gloves of the scientists wearing them to the point it's interfering with the experiment and so... it's less of a problem?
This study assumes everybody is oblivious to contamination, and explicitly says they can't differentiate. Not useful and bordering on the tautological
So the problem is these particles are literally flying off the gloves of the scientists wearing them to the point it's interfering with the experiment and so... it's less of a problem?
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).…
Now why would anyone do that when the headline already supports their uninformed opinion?
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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.
This seems to be the Casefile episode about the "Phantom of Heilbronn" https://casefilepodcast.com/case-178-the-woman-without-a-fac...
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> 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...
Doesn't have to be one or the other. Trust, but verify? Experts make mistakes, professional equipment can be mishandled. Don't take anybodies word, look at the evidence for yourself. This is a very scientific way of thinking. It's only gotten a bad rap on account of people using it to attack others' research and then(crucially) failing to perform their own.
Called it! > To be honest, after reading some of these microplastics papers I'm starting to suspect most of them are bullshit. 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 cl…
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?
It took years to figure out proper methods and many subfields have their own adjusted procedures and sometimes even statistical models. At least with DNA you could denature it very effectively, I’m not sure how they’re going to figure out the contamination issue with microplastics.
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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?
On the one hand, hundreds or perhaps thousands of studies might be wrong. On the other hand, this one might be wrong. Who's to say?
But as mentioned elsewhere in the thread, everyone knows that it's possible and take measure to mitigate it.
A paper that said those mitigations were insufficient or empirically found not to work would be interesting. A paper saying "you should mitigate this" is... not very interesting.
So the problem is these particles are literally flying off the gloves of the scientists wearing them to the point it's interfering with the experiment and so... it's less of a problem?
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.