Nitrile and latex gloves may cause overestimation of microplastics

The samples were not contaminated by plastic in the gloves. Latex gloves don't contain plastic, they're made from natural rubber. Nitrile gloves also don't contain plastic, although they're very similar to plastic.

The contamination that this study found wasn't microplastic contamination. The gloves weren't adding microplastics. The gloves were adding stearates, which aren't plastic, but look like microplastic in many of the methods for measuring microplastics.

I think you're grossly overestimating the complexity of most modern science outside of physics and mathematics (and computing, as an intersection of the two).

Good science is actually pretty easy to explain most of the time. It may take a long time to become a domain expert thst can perform novel research in a field but it it's well within the understanding of most people to have a single topic explained to them by an expert.

In fact, that very thing happens in courtrooms all the time.

Your condescending attitude is why people don't trust authorities and with good reason. If you can't help people understand science, it's you that doesn't understand it.

Furthermore, I hope you realize how close your "self-evident" logic is to a lot of extremely gross and genocidal ideologies of the past and present.

> then the entire experiment is invalid

Isn’t that what I said? You even quoted me saying it. But I didn’t say anything about only control being contaminated or mis-measured, I think you’re assuming something I didn’t say. Validity is, of course, compromised if the control is compromised, regardless of what happens to the test samples.

> The control cannot be “mis-measured” […] yes, the control may itself be contaminated […]

So which is it? Isn’t the article we’re commenting on talking about the possibility of mis-measuring? Are you suggesting this article cannot possibly be an issue when measuring control samples? Why not?

Controls absolutely can be mis-measured or contaminated or both. It has been known to happen. It’s bad when this happens because it means the experiment has to be re-done.

> If the experimental process contaminates the controls, it will also contaminate the non-controls

Yes! This is exactly what I was implying, and is exactly how you might end up underestimating the relative presence of whatever you’re looking for in the test, if your classification procedure overestimates it.

> You’re looking for between-group differences

Yes! and this is why if, for example, you didn’t notice your control had stearates and you counted them as microplastics accidentally, and then reported that your test sample had 2x more microplastics than your control, you might have missed the fact that your test actually had 10x more microplastics, or that your control actually had none when you thought incorrectly that it had some.

This, of course, is not the only possible outcome, not the only way that the results might be distorted. But this is one possible outcome that the Michigan paper at hand is warning against, no?

> Most of the papers I have read are far, far from even that naïve baseline.

Short of it, or exceeding it? Based on earlier comments, I assume you mean they’re not meeting your standards. I don’t know what you’ve read, and my brief googling did not seem to support your claims here so far. Can you provide some references? It would be especially helpful if you showed recent/modern SOTA papers, work that is considered accurate, and is highly referenced.