The original paper about microplastics in the brain seems to have a serious methodological flaw that undermines the conclusion that our brains are swimming in microplastics.
“False positives of microplastics are common to almost all methods of detecting them,” Jones says. “This is quite a serious issue in microplastics work.”
Brain tissue contains a large amount of lipids, some of which have similar mass spectra as the plastic polyethylene, Wagner says. “Most of the presumed plastic they found is polyethylene, which to me really indicates that they didn’t really clean up their samples properly.” Jones says he shares these concerns.
This is from other microplastics researchers. See this article. So before we panic about this, let’s wait for some independent replication and more agreement in the scientific community.
Microplastics are a serious concern, and we need to deal with plastic pollution. Let’s just stick to high quality science while we do that.
Thank you for the nuance. Bad data and hyperbole doesn’t help what I agreed is a serious issue.
Psypost is like the the Daily Mail of science journalism. Kind of just dismiss everything I see from them at this point. Thank you for the rebuttal.
So what? We all have to make a bit of sacrifice to maximize shareholder value. Stop whining about it!
Tap for spoiler
/s
It will trickle down any time now
Microsplastics have already trickled down to balls. This is what winning feels like, folks.
lets sacrifice shareholders for value instead
wow! I’m glad you did the /s I am incapable of parsing sarcasm due to my plastic induced retardation on Reddit
Instead I have to make aggressive snarky comments with slurs because I have to engage and create rage bait, due to my social media induced rate addiction
ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ
I don’t think this is the kind of neuroplasticity we’re supposed to be aiming for.
I’m a Barbie girl, in the Barbie world
Life in plastic, it’s fantasticWho would have guessed that song was an apocalyptic warning
On the contrary, who didn’t?
Let me share with you unique kind of emotions:) (I mean this in good faith)
non-native English speakers. It’s actually a distinct source of getting astonished: grow up with some English songs around, love them for their melody and whatnot, then learn some English, then actually listen to or read the lyrics, and… oh, damn. So many things come out in totally different light
Yup it’s quite saucy
Ah ah ah yeah!
Were the Nazi rumors about them widespread back then?
Not really. I found it quite ominous never the less
The researchers speculate that microplastics could contribute to neurological conditions by obstructing blood flow, interfering with neural connections, or triggering inflammation in the brain.
A whole generation dumbed down by lead and now microplastics. We fucked
This is just one more apocalypse to add to the pile. We are no more fucked that before we knew about this. Humanity can only die once.
Still, kinda shit, eh?
The shitty part is it won’t just be us. Animals who had nothing to do with our shit will likely die right along with us.
Absolutely. I was just talking about my daily life. I don’t give a shit if something gives me cancer or sterilizes me at this point. My body is so irrevocably fucked by pollution already, unless it kills me/debilitates me within the next 10 years, I don’t care. A shortening life span is meaningless to me.
Nature is healing.
Also thanks for providing the info what it may cause.
I am so glad I didn’t bring any children into this world.
For real. And now I feel like people are either extremely stupid or just monsters for having kids.
Humanity is wasted. Its wild that I think I might actually favor a humanity ending natural disaster over continuing whatever the fuck humans are doing now.
Edgy…
Despite having no desire to have kids, I’d much rather be born today than pretty much any time before the last few generations.
That really depends on where you were born and what status you were born into. You could be born into a lot of places today that you would starve or live under miserable conditions.
Of course, but your chances overall are better today regardless of class/status etc.
Even being the child of royalty had no guarantees. For example Henry VIII had 13 legitimate children. Only 3 lived past infancy, and 1 of those died age 15.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_of_Henry_VIII
In 1900, the average life expectancy of a newborn was 32 years. By 2021 this had more than doubled to 71 years.
in 1800, no region had a life expectancy higher than 40 years.
That’s the point I’m making, it’s not about YOU, you are not the child being born. Your opinion doesn’t matter to the kid being born.
What? I’m saying that if I was the kid being born I would rather be born today than in the 1500s.
Scary. Is plastic more or less expensive than cardboard/paper? I’m not sure if it’s where I live, but I’ve noticed that during my childhood, (example) most takeout containers would be either foil or paper. Now, most of them are plastic, even the cups that contain sauces. I don’t get why plastic has been embraced so much when the alternatives were far easier to recycle.
Plastic is generally cheaper; for a while there was a misguided push against using paper/cardboard because sAvE tHe TrEeS
Plastic’s a product from the Oil and Gas industry - a crude oil byproduct, naptha into nurdles - and they make a fucktonne of cash from it. Obviously not talking about every type of plastic or the “bio-plastics.” Almost all plastic comes from O&G.
I recall a moment maybe in the early 2000s when the industry lobby tried arguing they were actually being environmentalists and serving the public good by making plastic out of what would otherwise be toxic waste, like they’re responsibly using every part of the animal. So ridiculous they dropped the campaign within the week iirc.
But I think about that every time a Premier or Mayor comes out weirdly, strongly opposed to this plastic bag or that plastic straw being banned - that they’re virtue signalling to the O&G lobby.
So it’s not about what consumers or society embrace, or what’s logical or easier. O&G don’t care if we recycle it, huff the fumes melting it down, or feed it to the fishes. They don’t even really care how little their nurdle sells for, just as long as they can still sell it for something.
The plastic industry is why.
Plastic also has the benefit that it’s really easy to make in whatever shape with injection molding, and is totally permanent, which if you don’t care about disposal is great.
Meanwhile, making stuff out of a sheet of paper is a manufacturing challenge that has resulted in creative solutions like corrugation, and the container might seep through or soften or something.
There’s a thing called extended producer responsibility which basically is the idea of making disposal not free anymore for the manufacturer.
permenent? can’t plastic get melted down and recycled again?
once i put some plastic container in the dishwasher and it got too hot, it kind of melted a bit. it didn’t totally melt but the lid doesn’t fit anymore.
i dunno if it was injection molded though
Not very well. Those long molecules break down into shorter segments every time they’re recycled, which makes for an inferior and eventually useless product. Some plastics are also thermoset and can’t ever be melted again, and some are just hard to recycle for other reasons and get picked out and landfilled. The whole idea of plastics recycling is basically greenwashing on a massive scale; the industry put a lot of money into promoting it to avoid scrutiny.
That being said, they’re also permanent in the good way. Plastics don’t biodegrade or erode. If you bury a plastic pipe in the ground, it may well still be there and intact in a million years. Anything natural will rot long before that, common metals will corrode, and concrete usually has metal rebar inside that pulls it apart as it corrodes. Plastic is also lightweight, which ceramics (stone-like materials) and metals are not, while still being strong under tension like metals.
Sunlight does slowly break down many plastics, but only into ever-smaller particles, which is where the microplastics in OP come from.
oh wow, i didn’t realize that, i thought it was infinitely reusable just by melting and re-forming it. thank you really much for the explanation.
what you wrote reminded me of silly putty, it’s really stretchy and elastic to start with, but if you play with it for a while, it starts to be less elastic and breaks apart.
does metal also break down? i’m thinking about like aluminium cans that are used for soda and stuff like that
Nope, metals are elements as opposed to molecule compounds and literally can be melted and cast forever. They say most of the gold ever mined is still in use today, so your modern ring might have bits of a ring melted down in ancient Egypt in it. Glass is like this too. Paper is more like plastic, albeit somewhat biodegradable when it eventually has to be thrown out.
In practice, there’s still a limit for many metals because they will get contaminated. Copper building up in scrap steel is a problem IIRC. It’s not a big issue with aluminum, though, unless you’re doing something like building an airplane where you need super high purity. Cans are almost all recycled into more cans.
There are ways to purify a metal melt, but they can be expensive and usually produce waste slag. I’ve never heard of glass being purified; it’s probably too cheap to not just make more of, since it’s derived from really common minerals.
thank you for the explanation, it was really interesting and in-depth! you should be a teacher!
Thanks! I’m not sure I have the same presence IRL, haha.
My cast iron pan was made from recycled iron. And if I bought it a month later it would be in the batch that has a product recall because they also recycled some lead in it
Yep, that’ll do it. If you have a pile of scrapped iron things, you have to think it wouldn’t be hard to miss something that has a lead battery or weight in it somewhere. Although, I have to wonder why they didn’t test that batch before it was sold, if it’s for cooking in.
I seem to remember a story about a radiation source for probing gas wells getting into scrap and causing problems. They just look something like a metal cylinder, so would blend in easily with all the other oil and gas errata getting scrapped.
A lot of metals are fairly easy to recycle. For others, being alloys (basically a mix of various metals in varying quantities), it’s more tricky as you can’t always really get a pure product out of recycling very easily, so it limits the types of things you can do with them. But all in all it’s way better than with plastics.
I’m not so sure what cardboard/paper you mean? If you mean something like the paper cups that coffee comes in, they also contain plastic. Dirty paper/cardboard can also not be recycled, so your pizza carton ends up in a landfill or burned. And what do you mean by foil? Genuinely curious.
In my area a lot of takeout places now offer reusable options for a deposit. Usually it is a cardboard with plastic lining container if it is one way. Except the Asian takeout places, they are all over the place from classic black plastic to aluminum containers to styropor to - circling back - the plastic carton stuff.
He believes that food, especially meat, is the primary source of microplastics entering the body, as commercial meat production tends to accumulate plastic particles within the food chain.
“The way we irrigate fields with plastic-contaminated water, we postulate that the plastics build up there,” Campen said. “We feed those crops to our livestock. We take the manure and put it back on the field, so there may be a sort of feed-forward biomagnification.”
Go vegan, I guess?
Yes, and:
“Bottled water alone can expose people to nearly as many microplastic particles annually as all ingested and inhaled sources combined,” said Brandon Luu, an Internal Medicine Resident at the University of Toronto. “Switching to tap water could reduce this exposure by almost 90%, making it one of the simplest ways to cut down on microplastic intake.”
I think that’s mostly an issue in America. Here in Europe you can always drink tap water.
It’s not just whether tap water is potable, it’s also about availability. My job gives us water in bottles because we’re mobile for 12 hours at a time, and nowhere near accessible water pipes. I guess I’m fucked.
If I were you I would buy re-usable glass or metal bottles and fill them up before leaving
We need to immediately research if people in maga areas are the ones who can’t drink the tap water
We’re all gonna be drinking from the hose and eating peanut butter sandwiches out of aluminium foil wrappers like a bunch of gen-x kids.
All the pipes are plastic too.
Another type of plastic though than the ones used for typical drinking bottles. I can imagine they are more robust. But it would be really good to know the microplastic intake through such plastic pipes.
Is this the case for all plastic bottles? Like for sodas and juices?
Yes.
Can plastic stay in it’s plastic form after undergoing cooking?
I suppose so. Even though they already melt at typical frying or baking temperatures, they don’t evaporate. Even if, the still need to find a way through the food outside and not get trapped inside, where they’ll cool down again and therefore return to a solid state.
Take this with a grain of microplastic-free salt, as this is not my field.
Come on asteroid where the fuck are you….
Was this writen by AI?
The researchers found surprisingly high levels of microplastics in the brain tissue. The concentration of plastics in the brain was much greater than that found in the liver or kidney samples. It was also higher than levels previously reported in placentas and testes. The median amount of total plastics for 2024 brain samples was 4917 micrograms per gram, and for 2016 samples, it was 3345 micrograms per gram. For comparison, the 2024 liver and kidney samples were 433 and 404 micrograms per gram, respectively.
Even more concerning was the finding that the amount of plastic in the brain was increasing over time. Brain tissue samples from 2024 had significantly higher levels of microplastics than samples from 2016, representing an approximate 50% increase in just eight years.
Isn’t that the same information just repeated after each other?
To measure the microplastics, the researchers first chemically dissolved the tissue. This created a liquid mixture. They then spun this mixture at very high speeds in a machine called a centrifuge. This process separated out any undissolved materials, including plastics, into a small pellet. Next, they heated this pellet to a very high temperature (600 degrees Celsius), a process that breaks down the plastic.
Why does this sound like somebody explaining this to a 10 year old?
Yes, it is. Probably a few phrases written by a human and then a summary of the article with AI.
I don’t know if you’ve heard, but our brains are apparently full of plastic. We need articles like this dumbed down for us.
AI is actually known to not repeat itself. This is also why it tends to use rare/unusual words since it cannot use the same words repeatedly. Not saying this isn’t AI, but repetitiveness is not really an AI trait
I’ve definitely seen AI get into loops personally. From what you’re saying it sounds like they’ve added restrictions on reusing words to try and solve that.
https://i.redd.it/9incn595pnvc1.jpeg
This is a fine example of AI not being allowed to commonly re-use words, so it tends to use somewhat less common words
Known not to repeat itself? You should listen HFY stories.
Just recently listened to one that referred to the gas giant outside several times and the alien chick’s long ears giving away that she’s an alien many times. We get it! Don’t need to introduce her more than once. Jesus.
EDIT: If anyone is interested in the one I was referring to specifically, here you go:
Not reusing words isn’t the same as not repeating itself. Especially if it’s been given a minimum word count, it will often restate the same information in different ways to fill space.
Of course, this can happen with actual writers as well. That’s why editors used to exist.
I can feel it
same honestly
plastic pilled micro-maxxer
Now I can make a spork?
I am longing for plastic-eating bacteria to be released into the wild. There are other materials we can use.
The medical field would be categorically fuct. Just the loss of sterile packaging would have serious consequences. Minimally invasive surgeries, joint replacements, bandages that don’t adhere to wounds, stents…
Then let’s consider cordage. Mountain climbing, arborists, rescue teams, sailboats (the most efficient way to cross oceans), ships, construction… the loss of just Dyneema/UHMWPE, which is a relatively new entrant to the cordage field would have seriously negative impacts.
There is a lot of energy bound up in those long molecules, and there are no unexploited niches in balanced ecosystems. There are already bacteria that can consume certain polymers under narrow conditions. Humanity is gonna be so screwed for a long time if bacteria can slip those narrow parameters.
Think of how many things around you are made of plastic. What about critical pieces of things like airplanes? What would you replace that with to prevent the bacteria from causing damage to them?
I could probably pick a few things on my desk right now that would be much more difficult and much more costly to produce with other materials.
Yes, I am sure such a bacteria being released at this scale would have absolutely zero negative consequences
As opposed to the alternative?
implying there are only two possible options that could ever be imagined is not interesting
Like what? If you’re building an airplane or a sewer main all substitutes are inferior. The problem is that we’re using the ultra-permanent wonder material for, like, candy wrappers.
I would like for you to meet my friend, the oyster mushroom. I’m wondering what level of soil accumulation we need to support massive, city-wide oyster mushroom blooms
There are plastic eating microorganisms, both fungi, and bacteria.
But, they take a long time to break down plastic. I’ve had a fungus that can digest plastic in a mushroom cultivation bag for nine months and only one specimen has made it through so far.
I imagine splicing the gene that allows for the production of this enzyme into an ocean bound microorganism would clean up a lot of it while not affecting most of our terristrial infrastructure.
Of course, folks put plastic tubing and what not in the ocean too, so I guess we’ll all have to die instead.
We first need a way to use them to consume plastic in a controlled manner. There are things that simply would not be possible without these polymers and that we do not want destroyed.
Lmfao
We’re totally boned.
How the fuck are micro plastics getting into the brain?
More importantly, how are we getting them out?
Haha that’s the neat part
Bloodletting is making a comeback!
Attach your brain to a 3D printer. Make some use of all that plastic and print your thoughts. /j
You crazy son of a bitch. Im in
Most plastic melts at between 200°C and 320°C. So… Uh. Let’s fire up those ovens, baby.
I suggest we start with Dupont and 3M executives to field test the removal process - since they’re cool with testing their products on us.
Additional suggestions encouraged. Coke-Amatil? Tyre manufacturers?
There’s bacteria that can eat plastics. Lets hope they don’t eat brain too.
I don’t think that’s an option, given that they keep increasing
Via our blood
COMPLETE. GLOBAL. SATURATION.
