alt Hacker NewsCalled 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]
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> 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.
Maybe so, but plastics are also everywhere in our daily lives, including on the food we eat and in the clothes we wear. As we speak I just took some eggs out of a plastic carton, unwrapped some cheese from plastic wrap, and got oatmeal out of a plastic bag. The socks and pants I'm wearing are made of polyester.
If plastics cause contamination in a lab, would you not also expect similar contamination outside of the lab?
> That’s not to say that there is no microplastics pollution, the U-M researchers are quick to say. > > “We may be overestimating microplastics, but there should be none. There’s still a lot out there, and that’s the problem,”
shouldn't you be particularly attentive to your bias then? an article came out that _seems_ to confirm your previous belief that you arrive at without really testing? like everyone itt that is looking like the comments of an steven crowder comment section in a post about climate change
I haven't really read the studies but shouldn't they have negative controls to negate these effects? Wouldn't that let the author's correct for a baseline contamination level in the lab?