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Nitrile and latex gloves may cause overestimation of microplastics

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Re: Nitrile and latex gloves may cause overestimation of microplastics

#51

Carl Sagan was right all along. Always question science, never trust these so called experts, do your own assessment, research and thinking. This must be another global climate change scam.

I guarantee you Carl Sagan was not telling you to dismiss experts and he very much understood climate change was real. He literally testified before Congress on it, likely decades before you were even born.

It is generally bad practice to so drastically twist somebody’s words to make them say the opposite of what they’re saying. Carl Sagan would not agree with you.

Re: Nitrile and latex gloves may cause overestimation of microplastics

#54
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Not even that! This study doesn't even say contamination is causing overestimation. It says that it's possible. 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.

> Not even that! This study doesn't even say contamination is causing overestimation. It says that it's possible.

From the article:

> They found that on average, the gloves imparted about 2,000 false positives per millimeter squared area.

I dunno, that seems like a lot of false positives. Doesn’t that strongly imply that overestimation would be a pretty likely outcome here? Sounds like a completely sterile 1mm^2 area would raise a ton of false positives because of just the gloves.

Re: Nitrile and latex gloves may cause overestimation of microplastics

#55
I'm amazed that wasn't taken into account! Many years ago, in the final year of my Biology degree, I did a paid summer internship at an Evolutionary Biology lab here in Spain, assisting in a project where they were researching relationships between metal ion accumulation (mostly zinc) and certain SNPs (≈"gene varieties"). A lot of my work was in slicing tiny fragments of deep-frozen human livers and kidneys in a biosafety cabinet over dry ice.

The reason I bring this up is because the researchers had taken the essential precaution of providing me with a ceramic knife to do the cutting (and platic pliers), to eliminate the risk of contaminating the samples with metal from ordinary cutting implements.

That some research on microplatics did not take into account the absolutely mental amount of single-use plastic that is involved in biological research, particularly gloves of all things, boggles the mind.

Re: Nitrile and latex gloves may cause overestimation of microplastics

#56
post #20

Carl Sagan was right all along. Always question science, never trust these so called experts, do your own assessment, research and thinking. This must be another global climate change scam.

It is partially correct. Except make sure you have the necessary skills to question the science. Intuition in these things are quite misleading. Don't start questioning cancer reports just because you don't feel sick.If you really don't trust it, get a relevant medical degree or take second opinions from those who are really qualified and not some quacks. Otherwise you would just end up dead.

The problem with your claim that the plebs are incapable of research because they don't have equipment and are dumb is the wholesale erosion of belief in institutions after the COVID "vaccine" situation

Re: Nitrile and latex gloves may cause overestimation of microplastics

#58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

True, trust but verify and start questioning things. Science is now more politicized more than ever by politicians. COVID vaccines are not even tested. I didn't said this. Pfizer and Moderna CEO said this in EU parliament hearing.

The claim wasn’t it wasn’t tested but that it wasn’t tested for transmission prevention.

Still false

https://www.rmit.edu.au/news/factlab-meta/viral-pfizer--admi...

Re: Nitrile and latex gloves may cause overestimation of microplastics

#59
post #52

So basically the gloves that kitchen staff now must wear means we get an extra dose of micro plastics? Yikes.

It says similar.

“ Stearates are salts, or soap-like particles. Manufacturers coat disposable gloves with stearates to make them easier to peel from the molds used to form them. But stearates are also chemically very similar to some microplastics, according to the researchers, and can lead to false positives when researchers are looking for microplastic pollution.”

Stearates aren’t microplastics. Maybe we need to be concerned with stearate pollution too.

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