Nitrile and latex gloves may cause overestimation of microplastics

giantg2

Classic. This is like that female serial killer in Europe that turned out to actually just be DNA from a woman making the DNA collection swabs.

wewewedxfgdf

That's a relief. Now I can stop worrying about microplastics. Just like the environment - we don't hear much about it any more, so they must have sorted that out too. Didn't they? Did they?

darkerside

So the problem is these particles are literally flying off the gloves of the scientists wearing them to the point it's interfering with the experiment and so... it's less of a problem?

throwup238

Called it! > To be honest, after reading some of these microplastics papers I'm starting to suspect most of them are bullshit. Plastics are everywhere in a modern lab and rarely do these papers have proper controls, which I suspect would show that there is a baseline level of microplastic contamination in labs that is unavoidable. Petri dishes, pipettes, microplates, EVERYTHING is plastic, packaged in plastic, and cleaned using plastic tools, all by people wearing tons of synthetic fibers. > We went through this same nonsense when genetic sequencers first became available until people got it into their heads that DNA contamination was everywhere and that we had to be really careful with sample collection and statistical methods. [1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40681390

globemaster99

Carl Sagan was right all along. Always question science, never trust these so called experts, do your own assessment, research and thinking. This must be another global climate change scam.

khalic

This study assumes everybody is oblivious to contamination, and explicitly says they can't differentiate. Not useful and bordering on the tautological

inglor_cz

While we are used to associate "the observer effect" with particle physics, it can appear in biology and/or chemistry as well. Keeping things meticulously clean on the microscopic level is a complicated task. One of the many reasons why so few EUV chip fabs even exist.

lokinork

As per usual, they get the result then go back to do the study. Been happening in economics forever too.

BoredPositron

ITT people that only read the headline.

fHr

Didnt they use for newest studies to detect microplastic in placentas I think only non plastic omitting alternative gloves and material. Can't recall there it was specifically mentioned in a worldclass ARTE docu about microplastics maybe some ARTE Ultras here can recall.

keeperofdakeys

Reminds me of the story of Polywater. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywater

thomasgeelens

this feels like such a weird oversight in such a controlled environment: "oh my bad it was the gloves!" I wonder in how many other studies this happened?

zug_zug

This is good news, probably. We'll have to wait and see which studies replicate and which don't.

dust42

So basically the gloves that kitchen staff now must wear means we get an extra dose of micro plastics? Yikes.

Mordisquitos

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 biosafety cabinet over dry ice. The reason I bring this up is because the researchers had taken the essential precaution of providing me with a ceramic knife to do the cutting (and platic pliers), to eliminate the risk of contaminating the samples with metal from ordinary cutting implements. That some research on microplatics did not take into account the absolutely mental amount of single-use plastic that is involved in biological research, particularly gloves of all things, boggles the mind.

tasuki

So you're saying microplastics aren't a problem, because there's too much microplastics in gloves??

nobodyandproud

Finally some good news.

johnbarron

A rediscovery...six years later: "When Good Intentions Go Bad — False Positive Microplastic Detection Caused by Disposable Gloves" - https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.0c03742 From the study in the OP you cannot derive that current studies on microplastics are not valid. The headline framing that scientists have been measuring their own gloves, is science journalism doing what it does best... Stearates are water soluble soaps, so any study using standard wet chemistry extraction, and that is most of them, washes them away before analysis even begins. Stearates also cant mimic polystyrene, PET, PVC, nylon, or any of the dozens of other polymers routinely found in environmental and human tissue samples. Nothing to see here.

ErigmolCt

So the takeaway is: we've been accidentally adding "microplastics" with the very gloves we use to avoid contamination. That's almost poetic

beloch

"The researchers used air samplers which are fitted with a metal substrate. Air passes through the sampler, and particles from the atmosphere deposit onto the substrate. Then, using light-based spectroscopy, the researchers are able to determine what kind of particles are found on the substrate. Clough prepared the substrates while wearing nitrile gloves, which is recommended by the guidance of literature in the microplastics field. But when she examined the substrates to estimate how many microplastics she captured, the results were many thousands of times greater than what she expected to find." ------------------ The very first thing that should have been done is to run results for a substrate that hadn't been placed in the sampler. You need to know what a zero result looks like just to characterize your setup. You'd also want to run samples with known and controlled micro-plastic concentrations. Why didn't they do this? Their results are utterly meaningless if they didn't.