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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

#271

Post by [deleted] »

parineum wrote: post #264
mapontosevenths wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am right and I suspect you know it... you just don't like the way it makes you feel. Hence your focus on vibes and ad hominums rather than reason. It is self evident that moderm science is too complex for the average person to understand, and fifty percent of us are less intelligent than even that.

> It is self evident that moderm science is too complex for the average person to understand, and fifty percent of us are less intelligent than even that. 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 doma…

[deleted]

Re: Nitrile and latex gloves may cause overestimation of microplastics

#272

Post by Lerc »

schiffern wrote: post #232
Lerc wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Roughly 50% of indoor dust is composed of microplastics, so it's not like it's uncommon. I highly doubt that. Soil, skin and pollen are usually the big ones. Hairs depending one how you count dust, but eliminating hair like fibres would also eliminate most of the sources of plastic, unless you allow really large particle sizes. [edit] Checking research. The highest claim I found was 39% of fibres (in household dust,…

Thanks and noted, I'm happy to accept your figure. Even at 40% by number density that still means microplastics are hardly rare. I don't need to nitpick the exact number. It was just an aside anyway. My main point is that MPs are vehicles for toxins, which addresses the original question about how (supposedly inert) microplastics can cause harm. Thanks again for setting me straight, I must have misremembered.

It's good to keep in mind that there are a very broad range of figures. The Japan one was just the highest I could find with a quick search.

I like this study https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12302-019-0279-9 not so much because they give a definitive answer, but the provide a much better sense of the nuance that bold claims miss. It's too easy to make a bold claim of a number that seemingly contradicts another similarly bold claim. The nuanced approach can often reveal that both bold claims are, in fact, true but not meaningful because they lose significant context.

For example, a lot of reports on water use neglect locality of the use. What the term 'use' means (how much water does a hydroelectric dam use, is that the same sense of use as irrigation?), is there scarcity where it is used? Is it the same class of water as the water in demand (potable / brine / etc.)

The haphazard use of terms has resulted in an insane range of claims of water use per AI query (or lithium mined, or tomatoes grown). The lack of faith leads people to assume one party is lying, but often all of the numbers are accurate in a kind of way. Just not comparable and sometimes not even meaningful

Re: Nitrile and latex gloves may cause overestimation of microplastics

#273

Post by gus_massa »

gnabgib wrote: post #191
gus_massa wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here in Argentina we approved the Sputnik vaccine. It was approved only here and in Russia. And here it was approved not by the standard office (ANMAT), but by a special resolution of the Health Ministry.

We could find it in Canada too (due to distribution it wasn't super common)

You are right https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_COVID-19_vaccine_autho... It was approved here for 3 year old kids. Perhaps that was the odd part.

Re: Nitrile and latex gloves may cause overestimation of microplastics

#274

Post by kelseyfrog »

hnlmorg wrote: post #259
kelseyfrog wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please. You don't get special treatment for being a skeptic. Either you have the credentials or you don't. Prove you're qualified.

You don’t need to be qualified to be unsure about something. Being unsure is a healthy position because it’s an acknowledgment that you don’t know something entirely. Which can also means you have an open mind to learn more about that subject. Being certain, on the other hand, requires an assumption that you are a subject expert. But this is all moot anyway because you’re constructing an elaborate strawman here. The…

You can be skeptical in wrong ways. See solipsism for example.

Typically when I get genuine responses to the question, "What would change your mind?" it's an incredibly high bar that is practically impossible to achieve. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but when skepticism is applied without deliberation, it supports biases rather than truth.

So yes, you do need to be qualified to be skeptical, SWEs doubly so.

Re: Nitrile and latex gloves may cause overestimation of microplastics

#275

Post by andai »

andai wrote: post #260
genodethrowaway wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Testosterone has not fallen. That idea is mainly a result of bad sampling and incomparable measurements. See: https://xcancel.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/19804871302092350...

Thanks, I'll have to take another look at it. Last I checked, the ~2000-2020 situation was unfortunately consistent with the previous trend.

Fallen or not, it may apparently be doubled, with great benefits to mental and physical health.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/-x6TKr35J9I

No affiliation, just thought this was extremely interesting. This seems to boil down entirely to nutrition, from what I gathered.

Re: Nitrile and latex gloves may cause overestimation of microplastics

#276

Post by schiffern »

Lerc wrote: post #272
schiffern wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks and noted, I'm happy to accept your figure. Even at 40% by number density that still means microplastics are hardly rare. I don't need to nitpick the exact number. It was just an aside anyway. My main point is that MPs are vehicles for toxins, which addresses the original question about how (supposedly inert) microplastics can cause harm. Thanks again for setting me straight, I must have misremembered.

It's good to keep in mind that there are a very broad range of figures. The Japan one was just the highest I could find with a quick search. I like this study https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12302-019-0279-9 not so much because they give a definitive answer, but the provide a much better sense of the nuance that bold claims miss. It's too easy to make a bold claim of a number that seemingly contradicts ano…

I see you still don't say microplastics are rare. Violently agreeing with each-other, it seems. ;)

Synthetic textiles (clothes, upholstery, carpet, dryer exhaust, washer drainage) are of course the biggest culprits, with most of that trapped indoors with us, or co-located with human activity. If you have a dog that may change the mass fraction, but the MP exposure remains the same (or worse due to additional wear).

Road and tire wear is the other big contributor, again co-localized with population density. That's one of those nuanced cases, because a large fraction of the tire mass is actually natural rubber. The synthetic additives make it categorized as 100% plastic, but this may not accurately reflect reality in terms of the chemistry or hazard-based analysis.

Re: Nitrile and latex gloves may cause overestimation of microplastics

#277

Post by mapontosevenths »

parineum wrote: post #264
mapontosevenths wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am right and I suspect you know it... you just don't like the way it makes you feel. Hence your focus on vibes and ad hominums rather than reason. It is self evident that moderm science is too complex for the average person to understand, and fifty percent of us are less intelligent than even that.

> It is self evident that moderm science is too complex for the average person to understand, and fifty percent of us are less intelligent than even that. 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 doma…

I originally wrote a long winded response to this, but I deleted it. The more I think about your perspective the more I realize that though I disagree, it is also very reasonable of you to believe the way you do and I can respect that.

The truth is that we're both likely right to some extent, and wrong to some extent.

I now think that maybe there is no hard and fast rule one can apply to every situation to decide when one should decide for themself or just trust the experts. The optimal solution likely varies greatly depending on the specifics of the given situation, and it's very reasonable that we would have two very different takes about it.

Re: Nitrile and latex gloves may cause overestimation of microplastics

#279

Post by caycep »

Mordisquitos wrote: post #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 bios…

granted, I feel like maybe a review of lab equipment regularly is not a bad idea. in my low level undergraduate summer job, we realized all the stuff I did in those 3 months were moot at the end because I end up running some blanks on the pipetting robot and discovered that some glitch resulted in progressively less material being pipetted towards the end of the tray vs. the beginning....

Re: Nitrile and latex gloves may cause overestimation of microplastics

#280

Post by randomNumber7 »

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…

I tell you a secret. There are chemicals called PFAS which we all have in our body, they affect the body negatively (not in the current usual levels as far as I know) and they are so chemically stable they stay in the environment forever.
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