World News

A relative bright spot amidst a sea of bad news:

"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.”

Dunno if anyone reading this is still drinking bottled water, but, uh, now you have another reason to not do that.

So what? We all have to make a bit of sacrifice to maximize shareholder value. Stop whining about it!

I'm a Barbie girl, in the Barbie world
Life in plastic, it's fantastic

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.

This is why I do the following once per fortnight:

1. Obtain 1 liter of pharmaceutical-grade acetone.
2. Heat the acetone to 150C to sterilize it.
3. Cover the acetone with a sterile cover and let it cool to room temperature.
4. While the acetone is cooling, drill a small hole in skull with a heat-sterilized drill bit. (Or re-use previously drilled skull port.)
5. Once cooled, using a large syringe, inject 1 liter of sterile acetone directly into skull.
6. Shake head around for 2 minutes, let sit for 30 minutes.
7. After 30 minutes, attach new sterile needle to syringe and insert into skull port.
8. Withdraw 1 liter of fluid from skull.

Acetone will dissolve the microplastics inside your brain. Afterwards, the resulting solution can simply be syringed out and discarded. Alternately, the resulting solution can be recycled as an effective paint thinner.

/s (This WOULD remove microplastics from your brain, but it would also mean you wouldn't have to worry about microplastics at all, on the account of simply being dead.)

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

I am so glad I didn't bring any children into this world.

I don't think this is the kind of neuroplasticity we're supposed to be aiming for.

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?

Plastic has been the best and worst invention in human existence. We need a replacement for this asap.

Come on asteroid where the fuck are you….

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.

I can feel it

Lmfao

We're totally boned.

How the fuck are micro plastics getting into the brain?

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?

I am longing for plastic-eating bacteria to be released into the wild. There are other materials we can use.

COMPLETE. GLOBAL. SATURATION.

Maybe that's why I'm so tired.