We should not underestimate the prevalence of microplastics. They are everywhere—in our rivers, our lungs, and even in our blood. But researchers tracking this global pollution crisis may have inadvertently contaminated their research samples. The protective lab gloves they wear are shedding microplastic-like particles that tamper with their numbers.
The culprit, according to a University of Michigan study, is a soap-like residue used to pop disposable gloves out of factory molds. Even a light, dry touch sheds thousands of these false-positive particles onto lab equipment. Because this residue can produce a very similar vibrational signature to common plastics under a lab laser, scientists have been accidentally counting microplastics from their own lab gear as environmental pollution.
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The University of Michigan researchers mimicked typical lab handling across seven glove types. Across common nitrile and latex gloves, they found an average of roughly 2,000 false positives per square millimeter, with some glove types exceeding 7,000.
Two to seven thousand per square millimeter! That is 1.3 to 4.5 million per square inch.
Oh well, after the whole man-made global warming thingy? And oil only comes from dinosaurs and we going to run out! And a hundred other BS narratives?
We shouldn’t expect much out of the science community.
But ya, using plastic gloves around your micro-plastics sample is amazingly retarded.
Seems there’s a trivial solution to this: use wafer fab clean room gloves.
But MTHead has a point — for a lot of “scientists” getting accurate answers is not the goal. I recently read a nice article about Paul Ehrlich, when he had just died, observing that he first came to widespread notice with his alarmist writing about the deadly peril of global cooling. When global warming was invented, he seamlessly and shamelessly shifted to that story, never bothering to give any justification. Nor was he ever asked, presumably because the people pushing his fantasies were happy to distribute them, with the bogus authority of a “famous economist”.
This discovery is a bit unsettling! The sheer number of particles that can come from the gloves alone shows how easy it is for contamination to affect the accuracy of environmental studies. What kind of solutions are researchers considering to address this?
All environmental studies are hokum of some degree and should be ignored. Most are faked/manipulated and even the “honest” ones like this plastic doom-effery are poorly done.
Rain gets you wet, sunlight makes you happy, too much of either is bad for you.
Carry on and stop worrying so much.
*cough* any decent ‘scientists’ would have had control groups that made this obvious from day one *cough*
Exactly! Every High School Physics teacher makes some comment to his or her class about the difficulty of simply measuring the temperature of something without having the temperature of the measuring device affecting and distorting the actual temperature of whatever the mighty scientist was trying to measure.
I would go further than Anon, and say that any half-way competent laboratory “Candy-Striper” (to appropriate a phrase for unpaid low-skill assistants from hospital staffing) should be aware of this and make some effort to control for it. Major major policy decisions will be made based on the numbers collected.
Unless the object is not objective factual truth, but creating a panic demand for greater government presence and control.
To paraphrase Dan, below, “So what else is new?”
Any retractions and admissions of errors will be on the electronic media equivalent of page D-35, mixed in with the advertisements following the article about Fluffy, the water-skiing squirrel.
“Major major policy decisions will be made based on the numbers collected.”
Which is why they wont bother with controlling for it.
Nobody wants to be in the control group.
LOL! Much ado about nothing strikes again…
As I say, The Microplastics crisis cured the Plastics Hormonal mimicry, which cured Climate Change which cured Global Warming, which cured Acid Rain, which cured the Disappearance of the Ozone Layer, which cured the Paraquat contamination of the Sacrament of Marijuana scare, which cured the Alar on the Apples scare, which cured the exhaustion of Hydrocarbon fuels crisis, which cured Urban Sprawl, which cured Humans living unhealthily close to each other crisis, which cured Nuclear Winter, which cured Global Cooling, which cured — I forget — the Cold War? And of course the Cold War cured World War 2 and the Fascist Threat, which cured the Slaughter on the Highways resulting from driving more than forty miles per hour. I forget where the problem of antibiotic overuse, the Population explosion, and the lack of a national standard for education fell.
Oddly, all these panics required exactly the same cure — Ever more complicated and intrusive government regulation. I’m only seventy years old, and I remember how every one of these would have thrown us all back into the old Stone Age and massive starvation and death
After awhile it gets hard to remember these things in the proper order.
You should be grateful to big government for curing all these things before they threw you back into the stone age and killed you via mass starvation. 😉
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Having experience designing and implementing glove cleaning chemistries, I agree. Microelectronic gloves are tested for both particle shedding (IEST-RP-CC003.3/4 ) and metallic extractables (IEST-RP-CC005.4).
Since in producing the values for their microparticle claims, they use a laser particle counter, all they need additionally to validate gloves is an appropriate cleanroom and a Helmke drum (think miniature stainless steel dryer drum without heat.) This provides a standard and reproducible glove challenge, as the air from the drum is sampled by the particle counter as the gloves tumble.
7K is an absolutely vile indication, as I routinely produced gloves with counts in the very low hundreds. This type of glove, for obvious reasons, is expensive. Contaminating a wafer fab is many orders of magnitude more so.
And most (if not all) $9.99/ box of 100 gloves don’t have any cleanliness specification other a few rinses to remove the calcium chloride coagulating agent and corn starch former release powder.
There might (also very doubtful) be microbiological testing as surgical gloves are considered FDA Class I medical devices requiring 510(k) premarket notification. The ‘typical’ nitrile lab or exam glove would be regulated by 21 CFR 177 which is primarily concerned with food contact, not scientific rigor.
Wow! Thanks for the wealth of knowledge you brought to the discussion.
Don’t forget that the tests were also run very badly at times, detecting everything that was a carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen compound as a “plastic.” You know, like fat. (Or so the claim was made.)
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