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Nitrile and latex gloves may cause overestimation of microplastics

news.umich.edu

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Re: Nitrile and latex gloves may cause overestimation of microplastics

#141

Post by refulgentis »

timr wrote: post #124
bonoboTP wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there's an important distinction of smug better-knowing instances. "I have unique insight as a non-expert that all experts miss and the entire field is blind to" -> usually nonsense "I think in this specific instance academically qualified people are missing something that's obvious to me" -> often true.

There’s also the possibility that some of us actually, you know…have subject-matter expertise.

Doubtful, in your case, no?

"Nanomolar" is a dissolved-species concentration unit. It doesn't apply to spectroscopic particle counting.

Re: Nitrile and latex gloves may cause overestimation of microplastics

#142

Post by s0rce »

dust42 wrote: post #52

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

The stearates aren't microplastics, they aren't polymers, but they have chemical/spectroscopic similarity that results in them confusing the microplastics assays.

Re: Nitrile and latex gloves may cause overestimation of microplastics

#143

Post by s0rce »

cogman10 wrote: post #103
dust42 wrote: post #52

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

Funnily, I believe the glove mandates for food prep are actually anti-hygiene. Unlike bare skin, you can't really feel when your gloves are contaminated. So you are less likely to replace gloves when you should. With bare hands, you can feel the raw chicken juices on you, so it's pretty natural to want to wash your hands right after handling the raw chicken. Gloves are important in medicine, but that's with proper us…

People also don't develop good habits and constantly touch their face with gloves. I worked with surgeons in the hospital and they would point this out. Equally important in a cleanroom.

Re: Nitrile and latex gloves may cause overestimation of microplastics

#144

Post by s0rce »

MinimalAction wrote: post #136
beloch wrote: post #132

"The researchers used air samplers which are fitted with a metal substrate. Air passes through the sampler, and particles from the atmosphere deposit onto the substrate. Then, using light-based spectroscopy, the researchers are able to determine what kind of particles are found on the substrate. Clough prepared the substrates while wearing nitrile gloves, which is recommended by the guidance of literature in the micr…

Yeah, where is their control sample without any substrate on the sampler?

No substrate in the sampler means there would be nothing to test. Can't tell if you are joking.

Re: Nitrile and latex gloves may cause overestimation of microplastics

#145

Post by gus_massa »

pfdietz wrote: post #48
gus_massa wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> COVID vaccines are not even tested Do you have a link to the exact quote? IIRC they have a 95% reduction in hospitalization rate, measured in a double blind human trial. [Compare that with the vector virus and inactivated virus vaccines, that have like a 65% reduction in hospitalization rate, measured in a double blind human trial.]

Which reminds me, I need to arrange my biannual COVID booster.

Is it a only covid-19 booster or does it include a few of the other coronavirus floating around?

Re: Nitrile and latex gloves may cause overestimation of microplastics

#146

Post by refulgentis »

timr wrote: post #101
johnbarron wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> I'm amazed that wasn't taken into account! This was taken into account: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47563392

You found a paper saying that contamination is possible. That doesn’t mean that most of these plastic studies are doing the necessary controls, let alone the (almost impossible) task of preventing the contamination in a laboratory setting where nanomolar detection levels are used to make broad claims.

Not OP, but:

> "You found a paper"

johnbarron didn't find it. The authors cited it as foundational to their own work. it's ref. 38 in the paper under discussion. From the paper: "this finding had not been reported in the MP literature until 2020, when Witzig et al. reported that laboratory gloves submerged in water leached residues that were misidentified as polyethylene."[1]

> "most of these plastic studies are [not] doing the necessary controls"

which studies? The paper they linked surveys 26 QA/QC review articles[1]. Seems well understood.

> "a laboratory setting where nanomolar detection levels are used to make broad claims"

This is like saying "miles per gallon" when discussing weight. "nanomolar detection levels"...microplastics are individual particles identified by spectroscopy, reported as particles per mm^2. "Nanomolar" is a dissolved-species concentration unit. It has nothing to do with particle counting. (I, and other laymen, understand what you mean but you go on later in the thread to justify your unsourced and unjustified claims here via your subject-matter expertise.)

> "(almost impossible) task of preventing the contamination"

The paper provides open-access spectral libraries and conformal prediction workflows to identify and subtract stearate false positives from existing datasets[1]. Prevention isn't the strategy. Correction is. That's the entire point of the paper they linked and the follow-up in [2]

[1] https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlehtml/2026/ay/d5ay0180...

[2] https://news.umich.edu/nitrile-and-latex-gloves-may-cause-ov...

Re: Nitrile and latex gloves may cause overestimation of microplastics

#147

Post by throwup238 »

pton_xd wrote: post #80
throwup238 wrote: post #9

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…

> 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 cleaned using plastic tools, all by people wearing tons of synthetic fibers. Maybe so, but plastics are also everywhere in our…

I think you underestimate how much plastic is consumed in a lab doing experiments or analysis. I suspect it's an order of magnitude or two more than people are regularly exposed to at home or other non-industrial settings.

When I was an automation engineer at a lab, each liquid handler alone could go through several pounds of plastic pipette tips in a single day. All of that is made out of plastic and coated in a different thin layer of plastic to change the wettability of the tip. Even the glassware often comes coated in plastic and all these coatings are the thin layers most likely to create microplastics from abrasion (like the force of the pipette picking up the tip!). Throw all the packaging on top of that and there is just an insane amount of plastic.

The only place I've seen more plastic consumed is industrial and food manufacturing where everything is sprayed and resprayed with plastic coatings to reduce fouling.

Re: Nitrile and latex gloves may cause overestimation of microplastics

#148

Post by legitster »

I had always assumed there was a methodological failure that kept getting replicated. There were enough articles like "scientists find microplastics at bottom of peat bog" that really made me dubious of the claims.

"Strong claims require strong evidence". Somehow it happens pretty regularly in academia that only one method becomes acceptable and any conflicting results get herded out on technical grounds.

Re: Nitrile and latex gloves may cause overestimation of microplastics

#149

Post by estearum »

gus_massa wrote: post #108
mapontosevenths wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A man who represents himself as a lawyer has a fool for a client. A man who "does his own research" has a fool for a researcher.

But science is about doing your own research! The idea is that science results are based on evidence that is published in serious [1] peer review [2] journals. At some time you realize you can't repeat all the test at home, because it would be full of mice and transgenic plants and a huge particle collider and ... Also, there are a lot of very hard topics. So you must trust the system, but not too much. * Big pharma…

This is all a very fun thought experiment and whatnot but the reality is the COVID vaccines went through gigantic randomized controlled trials, our absolute best known method (by a gigantic margin) to figure out what is true.

Those trials unequivocally showed extremely high effectiveness and extremely high safety.

The people who say otherwise are simply wrong in this case. No matter how much philosophizing you or they want to do on epistemology. If they want to demonstrate otherwise, they need to conduct their own trials, ideally large, randomized, blinded, placebo-controlled trials.

> in other cases they say that the "control group" is an unrelated bunch of guys in another city.

This is not how trials work and you should go "do your own research" on the basics of the methodology before you opine on higher-order things like vaccines etc.

Re: Nitrile and latex gloves may cause overestimation of microplastics

#150

Post by david-gpu »

refulgentis wrote: post #128
idiotsecant wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Luckily HN software developers, the foremost authority on literally every subject imaginable, are here to bless the world with their insights.

Spiritual equivalent of a life sciences forum discovering memory safety, one person who wrote code for a bit saying they wrote a memory bug in C once, then someone clutching pearls about why all programmers irresponsibly write memory unsafe code given it has a global impact. Been here 16 years, it's always an adventure seeing whether stuff like this falls into: A) Polite interest that doesn't turn into self-keyword-a…

> Spiritual equivalent of a life sciences forum discovering memory safety, one person who wrote code for a bit saying they wrote a memory bug in C once, then someone clutching pearls about why programmers irresponsibly write memory unsafe code given it has a global impact.

I used to be a code monkey, I wrote systems software at megacorps, and still can't understand why so many programmers irresponsibly write memory unsafe code given it has a global impact.

So Poe's law applies here.

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