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Microplastics block blood flow in the brain, mouse study reveals

nature.com

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Re: Microplastics block blood flow in the brain, mouse study reveals

#61

Post by youniverse »

lm28469 wrote: post #7
butchkass wrote: post #2

People in a few decades will think we were crazy for packaging 100% of our food in plastic, the same way we think putting asbestos everywhere was crazy back then. The amount of strokes and aneurysms that are gonna happen in 20~50 years is gonna be truly fantastic.

Try to wipe your mind and walk in a supermarket as if you've never been in one, nothing makes sense whatsoever. Same for roads in the cities, endless streams of 2000kg+ hunk of steel, plastic and glass, 95% of them transport about 80kg of human, 95% of the time they're just parked taking space for no reason. Most things we designed are just so fucking inefficient and borderline insane, humans are very adaptable and i…

Anyone up for raising some money, going to some state that we can convince to give us a permit for a new town a little outside some big city. Or we can just like get support of a smaller town so we have some base to start from, building a ton of housing and infra isn't easy. But maybe in 5 years with robots it will be?? Minimal cars, preferably only for utilies. We can have just bike lanes and maybe dedicated electric scooter lanes. Everyone gets fresh organic food delivered to them every couple days, wrapped in no plastic. No supermarkets in town. Just an app you can order things with and some biker will bring it to you or something lol. Just have some general stores for immediate things people need.

There would be so much demand for this I feel like from people who could fund this experiment. Give the rest of the world a model to follow.

Re: Microplastics block blood flow in the brain, mouse study reveals

#62

Post by swatcoder »

BenFranklin100 wrote: post #14
butchkass wrote: post #2

People in a few decades will think we were crazy for packaging 100% of our food in plastic, the same way we think putting asbestos everywhere was crazy back then. The amount of strokes and aneurysms that are gonna happen in 20~50 years is gonna be truly fantastic.

Devils advocate here: food has been packaged in plastics for decades and plastic containers have been around longer than that. If plastics were as damaging as you claim, wouldn’t we have already seen this in the epidemiology?

> wouldn’t we have already seen this in the epidemiology?

What's your control group for a study that might confidently determine that one way or another? Where are food-plastics held off but everything else about modernity and its potential blights adopted?

Ultimately, there are numerous terrible trends in health and wellness that we see accumulate over the course of the 20th century, consistently echoed in developing communities as they join into modern practices. Some causes of death go way down, some experience of luxury goes way up, but misery and previously uncommon forms chronic illness seem sweep across each and every such community.

We don't have a good, scientific handle on what the specific causes are because there are so many simultaneous radical changes that are introduced into a community as it "modernizes", and while we can sort of flail about and speculate about individual mechanisms and test them individually, as in this study, it's consistently a limited and almost blind search among the innumerable unknown unknowns that we don't have the capability, finances, or will to explore at population scale or over decades-long periods of time.

We'll presumably catch up on some of our horrifically dumb mistakes, as the GP noted for things like asbestos, and plastics may or may not prove to be among them, but right now we mostly just know that we face huge new problems and most of us will probably be gone by the time society learns what it did to cause many of them.

Re: Microplastics block blood flow in the brain, mouse study reveals

#63

Post by swatcoder »

youniverse wrote: post #61
lm28469 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try to wipe your mind and walk in a supermarket as if you've never been in one, nothing makes sense whatsoever. Same for roads in the cities, endless streams of 2000kg+ hunk of steel, plastic and glass, 95% of them transport about 80kg of human, 95% of the time they're just parked taking space for no reason. Most things we designed are just so fucking inefficient and borderline insane, humans are very adaptable and i…

Anyone up for raising some money, going to some state that we can convince to give us a permit for a new town a little outside some big city. Or we can just like get support of a smaller town so we have some base to start from, building a ton of housing and infra isn't easy. But maybe in 5 years with robots it will be?? Minimal cars, preferably only for utilies. We can have just bike lanes and maybe dedicated electri…

Yes, that's essentially what's now called an "intentional community" and is a timeless migration and settlement practice that continues around the world today.

They usually start as modest settlements of like-minded people, drawing in more members as they thrive and bleeding off members if/when politics and drama spoil the relationships among the people that live in them. Many collapse, others transform and sustain, and others eventually integrate back into a world that moves closer to them. Along the way, in their isolation and because of their strict rejection of prevailing norms, they naturally get kind of incestuous and weird in terms of ideology, practice, etc.

While you're free to try to start a new one on your own, if you're inspired to do so, you can also probably find some that are more or less practicing the kind of lifestyle you have mind. But it probably won't be an exact match for your dream, as no two people have quite the same vision of escape or prosperity, which is something that would apply to your hypothetical community as well.

Re: Microplastics block blood flow in the brain, mouse study reveals

#64

Post by gwbas1c »

PaulKeeble wrote: post #49
gwbas1c wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started taking tea out of plastic teabags and dumping it into a tea sock.

You can buy loose tea and get metal tea stirrers that contain it which is about the best way to avoid the plastic. Still comes sealed in a plastic bag though, its very hard to avoid plastics at all.

But the tea that I like only comes in plastic tea bags!

Re: Microplastics block blood flow in the brain, mouse study reveals

#65

Post by myrmidon »

swatcoder wrote: post #62
BenFranklin100 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Devils advocate here: food has been packaged in plastics for decades and plastic containers have been around longer than that. If plastics were as damaging as you claim, wouldn’t we have already seen this in the epidemiology?

> wouldn’t we have already seen this in the epidemiology? What's your control group for a study that might confidently determine that one way or another? Where are food-plastics held off but everything else about modernity and its potential blights adopted? Ultimately, there are numerous terrible trends in health and wellness that we see accumulate over the course of the 20th century, consistently echoed in developin…

Very simplified-- looking at incidents over time is a good sanity check.

If you expect microplastics to cause problems with blood flow in brains, you would expect stroke rates to go up with "microplastics exposure".

But they don't; so either the effect is nonexistent, small enough to be drowned by noise or completely compensated by another product of progress, and, frankly, all those scenarios sound rather unconcerning to me compared to well known environmental problems (e.g. atmospheric CO2).

You are absolutely right that there are a plethora of other negative effects to look at, but I will trust the young scientists yearning for a Nature publication to do their job, and will focus my political vote and personal efforts on know big problems until science shows this to be one as well.

Re: Microplastics block blood flow in the brain, mouse study reveals

#66

Post by Loggias »

globular-toast wrote: post #54
macspoofing wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Most things we designed are just so fucking inefficient and borderline insane, Are they though? We're quite good (and dare I say it: 'efficient') at feeding, housing and transporting huge populations. Almost all the inefficiencies you mentioned are preference and/or comfort based. Society is not separated from laws of physics and economics. Everything is balanced against the cost of those services - when/if costs go…

> The human part of car ownership is freedom. I'm sure the car marketing department agrees with you. Unfortunately, the reality for most people is not about freedom, it's about necessity. A car is simply the only way to get around; there are no other options. Freedom can't exist without choice. If you actually observe daily car users you'll find they are angry and frustrated. I find these daily frustrations occupy a…

[dead]

Re: Microplastics block blood flow in the brain, mouse study reveals

#67

Post by sympil »

macspoofing wrote: post #45
sympil wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is the era of extreme inefficiency and waste. We are local min/max machines and need government to direct us to the global min/max but it doesn’t do that.

>We are local min/max machines and need government to direct us to the global min/max but it doesn’t do that. What is an example of that, because I governments do a reasonable of moving towards a global min/max. Where we haven't gone towards a global max/min is because it's actually hard. In many cases, the global min/max either isn't well defined, or if it is, you have to contend with existing infrastructure and hug…

Vehicles in the U.S. should be much smaller and town/cities should be much more dense and walkable.

Re: Microplastics block blood flow in the brain, mouse study reveals

#68

Post by [deleted] »

macspoofing wrote: post #41
lm28469 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try to wipe your mind and walk in a supermarket as if you've never been in one, nothing makes sense whatsoever. Same for roads in the cities, endless streams of 2000kg+ hunk of steel, plastic and glass, 95% of them transport about 80kg of human, 95% of the time they're just parked taking space for no reason. Most things we designed are just so fucking inefficient and borderline insane, humans are very adaptable and i…

>Most things we designed are just so fucking inefficient and borderline insane, Are they though? We're quite good (and dare I say it: 'efficient') at feeding, housing and transporting huge populations. Almost all the inefficiencies you mentioned are preference and/or comfort based. Society is not separated from laws of physics and economics. Everything is balanced against the cost of those services - when/if costs go…

[deleted]

Re: Microplastics block blood flow in the brain, mouse study reveals

#69

Post by short_sells_poo »

pocketarc wrote: post #55
short_sells_poo wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because the at best, the government can be a penalty condition in the objective function, and recently it's effect has been almost completely eclipsed by the near term gains. I believe what we'd need is education. The more educated the masses are, the more likely it is that they vote for governments that have the long term interests in mind, and the more likely it is that the government itself will then preven…

> I believe what we'd need is education. > The more educated the masses are, the more likely it is that they vote for governments that have the long term interests in mind Consider: Globally, the masses are more and better educated than at any other point in history. More people than ever have a higher-level education, and people have access to more information than ever before, more easily than ever before, and for…

Fair points, but perhaps let's look at it closer. Perhaps education has to be commensurate to people's access to information and the ability of power blocks to project influence. I agree that we are surrounded by knowledge and education, but we are also surrounded by disinformation, propaganda, marketing, adtech, etc...

I agree that people have never been as educated as today, but it was also much more difficult to project power over distances. Today, a fool in power can travel to the other side of the world in half a day and bully countries there into submission. More to the point, the fool doesn't even need to travel, they can do the bullying over a zoom call instantaneously. An extremely connected world with a vast number of feedback loops would need a proportionally more educated populace with much more robust foresight, no?

For what it's worth, I agree with your fundamental thesis that a lot of these issues are basic human nature, and unless that changes, anything we do will be highly ineffective. But we have to start somewhere, right? And it's much easier to sell a populist agenda to an uneducated populace who can only think forward 8 hours.

Consider this: people have been known to vote for increased taxes to pay for various public good projects. It can be done. Perhaps not necessarily on very large scales, because it's difficult to feel unity with people a 1000 miles away who are completely foreign to local concerns, but perhaps that's an argument for direct democracy. But direct democracy requires a population who is educated - at least in civil matters - and can put the long term goals in front of the short term pain.

Re: Microplastics block blood flow in the brain, mouse study reveals

#70

Post by therealcamino »

crazydoggers wrote: post #35
pulvinar wrote: post #25

This appears to be a poorly done study-- they're showing the mechanical effect of possible blockage, but they haven't shown that microplastics here are any different than particles of other inert substances found in our environment: clays, silt, organic debris, etc. Those have always been in our drinking water and the immune system deals with what gets into us.

Studying a single subject does not make it “poorly done”. That’s not how science works. A well done research experiment isn’t going to test everything known to man. They’re focused on microplastics and they’ve shown what microplastics can do in the human body. And even if other substances cause the same issue, it doesn’t negate that microplastics cause the issue. If others have a hypothesis that “microsilt” (is that…

That's one of my pet peeves on hn, the comments on microplastics studies, or I guess any in-progress science in general. If it's a study on the level of microplastic contamination the environment, or levels and sources of exposure, or to what extent it enters the body, people complain that we don't know yet if they cause harm. When is a study on potential harm, people complain that other substances might also cause harm. They complain generally that the studies don't have total answers, without understanding that this is how science gets us to the big picture.
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