Microplastics block blood flow in the brain, mouse study reveals (opens in new tab)

>Most things we designed are just so fucking inefficient and borderline insane,

Are they though? We're quite good (and dare I say it: 'efficient') at feeding, housing and transporting huge populations. Almost all the inefficiencies you mentioned are preference and/or comfort based. Society is not separated from laws of physics and economics. Everything is balanced against the cost of those services - when/if costs go up, you do tend to see corresponding change, typically in efficiency increase (e.g. smaller more efficient cars as gas prices go up).

>endless streams of 2000kg+ hunk of steel, plastic and glass, 95% of them transport about 80kg of human, 95% of the time they're just parked taking space for no reason.

That's true ... kind of ... there is a cost for car ownership and use that is different in different regions. If you're in New York, you're probably not driving to work.

The human part of car ownership is freedom. It's not ultra efficient to own a car, but there is something about it that is liberating for many people of all economic statuses. Most likely, in the future, car ownership will go away for the vast majority of people, and it will be sad when it does.

Generally living in massive empty spaces. On which energy is spend to heat and cool... And these empty spaces increase distances that we must travel...

Anyone up for raising some money, going to some state that we can convince to give us a permit for a new town a little outside some big city. Or we can just like get support of a smaller town so we have some base to start from, building a ton of housing and infra isn't easy. But maybe in 5 years with robots it will be?? Minimal cars, preferably only for utilies. We can have just bike lanes and maybe dedicated electric scooter lanes. Everyone gets fresh organic food delivered to them every couple days, wrapped in no plastic. No supermarkets in town. Just an app you can order things with and some biker will bring it to you or something lol. Just have some general stores for immediate things people need.

There would be so much demand for this I feel like from people who could fund this experiment. Give the rest of the world a model to follow.

It is the era of extreme inefficiency and waste. We are local min/max machines and need government to direct us to the global min/max but it doesn’t do that.

That’a fair point and I might be overpanicking. I could argue that it might be happening and we just don’t know about it, but from what I gathered, yes strokes are on the rise, but experts seem to believe it’s related to blood pressure. Although there probably weren’t as much microplastics when the last generation was born ; it’s now ubiquitous to the point of being found in the blood of fetuses. If gen Z and Alpha don’t die from aneurysms at 45, then yeah, I guess we could assume it isn’t dangerous.

I’m just tired of this kind of things : conglomerates are putting X everywhere, and then we have to prove that X is indeed dangerous, when they should be the ones proving that it isn’t. All the while they’re lobbying billions of dollars to try and make the research as slow as possible so that they can get every last cent of profit before X gets banned.

> wouldn’t we have already seen this in the epidemiology?

What's your control group for a study that might confidently determine that one way or another? Where are food-plastics held off but everything else about modernity and its potential blights adopted?

Ultimately, there are numerous terrible trends in health and wellness that we see accumulate over the course of the 20th century, consistently echoed in developing communities as they join into modern practices. Some causes of death go way down, some experience of luxury goes way up, but misery and previously uncommon forms chronic illness seem sweep across each and every such community.

We don't have a good, scientific handle on what the specific causes are because there are so many simultaneous radical changes that are introduced into a community as it "modernizes", and while we can sort of flail about and speculate about individual mechanisms and test them individually, as in this study, it's consistently a limited and almost blind search among the innumerable unknown unknowns that we don't have the capability, finances, or will to explore at population scale or over decades-long periods of time.

We'll presumably catch up on some of our horrifically dumb mistakes, as the GP noted for things like asbestos, and plastics may or may not prove to be among them, but right now we mostly just know that we face huge new problems and most of us will probably be gone by the time society learns what it did to cause many of them.

Yes, I wondered this myself. I guess it's simply that it's taken a long time for the amount of micro plastics to become problematic. Some types of micro plastics come from disintegration of plastic materials, which takes time.

maybe it's more the accumulation. less the plastic wrap rubbing off on the fruit, but the plastic wrapper getting thrown away and ending up breaking apart in the water.

Not even the experts, the MBAs did. Then the JDs did the lobbying to make sure government agencies were powerless to stop them.

In reality, there was not a single "expert" in the room. In fact, if you were "expert" in any field other than business or law, you were very likely removed as a candidate to even be one of the people chosen to be in the room long ago.

FFP3 and N95 masks will stop micro and nano plastics but the issue is its polypropylene, so the question becomes how much it sheds verses how much it blocks. Most of the PM2.5/10 tests against these masks shows they are better than outside air but I don't think the exact composition is fully understood. Based on how its sort blown molten fibres I suspect it sheds quite large bits of plastic if it does.

The RO filtration membrane is also made of plastic. I haven’t found a way to avoid microplastics even though I have my own well and have an RO system.

> ideally would prefer something like reverse osmosis but not so practical

Just curious why that is? I was going to buy one for my new house and they seem pretty practical, at least for drinking water at home.

Tires as well.

People think in terms of food packaging, and they certainly should. But the danger is actually everywhere in our modern life. The cars, the homes, the clothes, the food, the phones, the computers, the blankets, the sheets, the carpet, and so on and so forth.

This https://youtu.be/-ht7nOaIkpI?si=avIcOa76alLdbAqo ?

All synthetic clothing material sheds stuff constantly from abrasion and in much larger quantities when washing and drying.

"Live far away from roads"

I guess it's microplastics for me

So I guess it depends on your definition of "viable"

You can buy loose tea and get metal tea stirrers that contain it which is about the best way to avoid the plastic. Still comes sealed in a plastic bag though, its very hard to avoid plastics at all.

That's one of my pet peeves on hn, the comments on microplastics studies, or I guess any in-progress science in general. If it's a study on the level of microplastic contamination the environment, or levels and sources of exposure, or to what extent it enters the body, people complain that we don't know yet if they cause harm. When is a study on potential harm, people complain that other substances might also cause harm. They complain generally that the studies don't have total answers, without understanding that this is how science gets us to the big picture.

Mechanically, how could this make any difference whatsoever?

The question is are microplastics doing anything different in this case.

The study shows that microplastics may block. It doesn't show that micro-natural-substances may not also block.

I'd like to see more actual science, and less fear mongering.