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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

#171

Post by sarchertech »

mapontosevenths wrote: post #151
gus_massa wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> But science is about doing your own research! Not for the average adult human on planet Earth, no. Fifty percent of people are of below average intelligence. Of the 50% that remain only a fraction have access to the equipment necessary to replicate any given experiment, of that fraction only a small percentage will have the knowledge, skills, and abilities to accurately replicate any given experiment, of that tiny…

There’s nothing wrong with doing your own experiments as long as you understand your limitations. But that’s not what people mean when they say they “did their own research”.

They mean that they went online and found blogs and YouTube videos that agree with whatever crackpot view they already held.

The issue with picking people and organizations to trust (which you absolutely should do) is that the average person isn’t even able to evaluate what qualified means. And RFK jr. is the guy appointing the “qualified people” who run things. On paper many of them are qualified, but in reality they’re crackpots.

You have to dig a level deeper and understand that this set of qualified people are actually just nuts who essentially performed the scientific equivalent of a coup because their ideas couldn’t win on merit.

Re: Nitrile and latex gloves may cause overestimation of microplastics

#172

Post by kelseyfrog »

hnlmorg wrote: post #164
Der_Einzige wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You joke, but given that SWE/AI researchers literally invented AI that does everything else for them and is often super-human at intelligence across most things, I would unironically prefer the opinion of the creator of such a system over most others for most things.

I cooked a steak yesterday therefore I am an expert in biology. Creating a user interface for the world’s knowledge doesn’t make the developer an expert on the knowledge that the interface holds in its database. Regardless of how sophisticated that interface might be.

'I disagree, therefore I am an expert in skepticism.' The sword cuts both ways.

Re: Nitrile and latex gloves may cause overestimation of microplastics

#173

Post by Barbing »

EPWN3D wrote: post #161

The various "OMG MICROPLASTICS" studies always smacked of alarmism. No one has actually identified tangible harms from microplastics; it's just taken as a given that they are bad. So this fueled a bunch of studies that tried to find them everywhere. Even the authors of this study go to great pains to not challenge the dogma that microplastics are existentially terrifying. So I fully expect we'll still be panicking ov…

I’ll breathe tires a little easier today :)

Hey remember what happened with BPA? That was frustrating. We saw ostensibly legitimate concern, then manufacturers telling us they got rid of it. Maybe it would’ve inspired confidence if the removal adverts came with data sheets on the replacement chemicals.

Re: Nitrile and latex gloves may cause overestimation of microplastics

#174

Post by timr »

dahart wrote: post #133
timr wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Are more “controls” what is necessary here? The problem wasn’t plastic contamination, it was the presence of stearates. Distinguishing between stearates and microplastics sounds like a classification problem, not a control problem. There is practically universal recognition among microplastics researchers that contamination is possible and that strong quality controls are needed, and to be transparent and reproducibl…

Many papers in this field are missing obvious controls, but you’re correct that controls alone are insufficient to solve this problem.

When you are taking measurements at the detection limit of any molecule that is widespread in the environment, you are going to have a difficult time of distinguishing signal from background. This requires sampling and replication and rigorous application of statistical inference.

> Another thing to consider is that papers generally compare against baseline/control samples,

Right, that’s what a control is.

> and overestimating microplastics in baseline samples may lead to a lower ratio of reported microplastics in the test samples, not higher.

There’s no such thing as “overestimating in baseline samples”, unless you’re just doing a different measurement entirely.

What you’re trying to say is that if there’s a chemical everywhere, the prevalence makes it harder to claim that small measurement differences in the “treatment” arm are significant. This is a feature, not a bug.

Re: Nitrile and latex gloves may cause overestimation of microplastics

#175

Post by timr »

refulgentis wrote: post #146
timr wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.)

This paper used “light-based spectroscopy” [1]. Many others use methods that depend on gas chromatography or NMR. A relatively infamous recent example used pyrolysis GCMS to make low-concentration measurements (hence: nanomolar), which they credulously scaled up by some huge factor, and then made idiotic claims about plastic spoons in brains.

Relatively little quantitative science in this area depends on counting plastic particles in microscopic images, but it’s what gets headlines, because laypeople understand pictures.

[1] as an aside, the choice of terminology here is noteworthy. A simple visual light absorption spectra is also “light based spectroscopy”, but is measuring the aggregate response of a sample of a heterogeneous mixture, and is conventionally converted to molar equivalents via some sort of calibration curve (otherwise you can’t conclude anything). But there could be other approaches that are closer to microscopy, which they also discuss. “Particles per square millimeter” is also a unit of concentration (albeit a shitty one, unless your particles are of uniform mass).

Anyway, the point is that these kinds of quantitative analyses are all trying to do measurements that are fundamentally about concentration, which is why I chose the words that I did.

Re: Nitrile and latex gloves may cause overestimation of microplastics

#176

Post by parineum »

mapontosevenths wrote: post #72
Dilettante_ wrote: post #28

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.

> Don't take anybodies word, look at the evidence for yourself. Please nobody listen to his person. There is nothing scientific about ignoring the experts to instead behold the opinions of the uninformed. The world is too large, too complex, and too nuanced for the layman's opinion to be worth much. When someone is unqualified treat their opinion as equal to every other unqualified persons opinion. Include your own i…

> The world is too large, too complex, and too nuanced for the layman's opinion to be worth much.

This has a very, "Trust us, we're with the government." feel to it.

I enjoy Asimov's writing immensely but if you think quotations are some kind of mic drop, I'll leave you with this one.

"The question then is not whether or not a girl should be touched. The question is merely where, when, and how she should be touched" ― Isaac Asimov

Re: Nitrile and latex gloves may cause overestimation of microplastics

#177

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Nitrile and latex gloves may cause overestimation of microplastics

#178

Post by _DeadFred_ »

eigenspace wrote: post #163
EPWN3D wrote: post #161

The various "OMG MICROPLASTICS" studies always smacked of alarmism. No one has actually identified tangible harms from microplastics; it's just taken as a given that they are bad. So this fueled a bunch of studies that tried to find them everywhere. Even the authors of this study go to great pains to not challenge the dogma that microplastics are existentially terrifying. So I fully expect we'll still be panicking ov…

So, I think that while it's true that we haven't really demonstrated any tangible harms of microplastics, and there is a lot of alarmism around it, I think the concern is more rational than it might appear. If it's true that microplastics are everywhere and in everything (which maybe that's now not actually the case), even a very small chance that there's some serious harm we're not aware of should be taken extremely…

We aren't really looking. In the most well known case we were able to identify they were killing salmon because the salmon were dieing and worked back from that, not because some study led there first.

https://www.ehn.org/toxic-tire-chemicals-threaten-salmon-as-...

Re: Nitrile and latex gloves may cause overestimation of microplastics

#179

Post by njarboe »

dahart wrote: post #133
timr wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Are more “controls” what is necessary here? The problem wasn’t plastic contamination, it was the presence of stearates. Distinguishing between stearates and microplastics sounds like a classification problem, not a control problem. There is practically universal recognition among microplastics researchers that contamination is possible and that strong quality controls are needed, and to be transparent and reproducibl…

Any scientific paper that does not document how things were done (methodologies) is basically worthless in the search for truth.

Re: Nitrile and latex gloves may cause overestimation of microplastics

#180

Post by willrshansen »

EPWN3D wrote: post #161

The various "OMG MICROPLASTICS" studies always smacked of alarmism. No one has actually identified tangible harms from microplastics; it's just taken as a given that they are bad. So this fueled a bunch of studies that tried to find them everywhere. Even the authors of this study go to great pains to not challenge the dogma that microplastics are existentially terrifying. So I fully expect we'll still be panicking ov…

Off the top of my head, wouldn't it be super easy to expose lab rats to microplastics and measure results?

No way this isn't heavily studies by now.

Edit: found a whole meta-study in like 30 seconds of searching: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/public-health/articles/...

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