544
Scientists issue dire warning: Microplastic accumulation in human brains escalating
(www.psypost.org)
Now I can make a spork?
this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2025
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So is it possible the blood-brain barrier is designed to trap nanoparticles? They do exist in nature.
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.
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(47 replies)
So what? We all have to make a bit of sacrifice to maximize shareholder value. Stop whining about it!
Tap for spoiler
/s
lets sacrifice shareholders for value instead
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I'm a Barbie girl, in the Barbie world
Life in plastic, it's fantastic
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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.
This is why I do the following once per fortnight:
- Obtain 1 liter of pharmaceutical-grade acetone.
- Heat the acetone to 150C to sterilize it.
- Cover the acetone with a sterile cover and let it cool to room temperature.
- While the acetone is cooling, drill a small hole in skull with a heat-sterilized drill bit. (Or re-use previously drilled skull port.)
- Once cooled, using a large syringe, inject 1 liter of sterile acetone directly into skull.
- Shake head around for 2 minutes, let sit for 30 minutes.
- After 30 minutes, attach new sterile needle to syringe and insert into skull port.
- 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.)
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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
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