this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2025
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[–] [email protected] 1 points 14 minutes ago

I am longing for plastic-eating bacteria to be released into the wild. There are other materials we can use.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 hours ago

Come on asteroid where the fuck are you….

[–] [email protected] 35 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

So what? We all have to make a bit of sacrifice to maximize shareholder value. Stop whining about it!

Tap for spoiler/s

[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

It will trickle down any time now

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 hour ago

Microsplastics have already trickled down to balls. This is what winning feels like, folks.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 hours ago

I can feel it

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 hours ago

COMPLETE. GLOBAL. SATURATION.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 3 hours ago (2 children)

At 600 degrees, there is probably some reaction happening there that may be similar to plastics. Basically, creating brain plastic and cooking it off to measure plastics. Im a bit skeptic.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 hours ago

I'm a microbiologist but my grad school work, research, and coursework was very chemistry heavy. There are no "probably does somethings" of significance here: the chemistry of plastic generation is extremely well researched.

Plastic is made of polymerized hydrocarbons, linked up identical tiny units of carbon strands called monomers. Polymerization, the linkage of the monomers into a polymer, requires the use of a catalyst. This is often done with increased heat and pressure to increase the speed of polymerization. Maximum temperatures are around 350°C for certain plastics but are more commonly 140-160°C as higher temperatures can cause the material to break down. Once the desired size of linkage is created, the polymer is capped to keep it from growing further.

Polymerized hydrocarbons degrade, not further polymerize somehow, at high temperatures like 600° C. Saying there's some mysterious, high-heat-driven polymerization is like saying burning wood, which is largely a polymer of glucose called cellulose, somehow creates more cellulose as it burns. The burning is due to the release of the energy contained in the bonds in the wood as they break down and react with oxygen.

Even if the process DID somehow create some plastic, a given mass of brain tissue would be expected to create predictable amounts of this mystery polymer, giving a background measurement that can be subtracted. Again, though, we know how this all works so it's not really a concern.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago

What is this hypothesis based on?

[–] [email protected] 35 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

I'm a Barbie girl, in the Barbie world
Life in plastic, it's fantastic

[–] [email protected] 15 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

Who would have guessed that song was an apocalyptic warning

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago

In the contrary, who didn't?

[–] [email protected] 28 points 10 hours ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 hours ago

Nature is healing.

Also thanks for providing the info what it may cause.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

This is just one more apocalypse to add to the pile. We are no more fucked that before we knew about this. Humanity can only die once.

Still, kinda shit, eh?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 hour ago

The shitty part is it won't just be us. Animals who had nothing to do with our shit will likely die right along with us.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

He believes that food, especially meat, is the primary source of microplastics entering the body, as commercial meat production tends to accumulate plastic particles within the food chain.

“The way we irrigate fields with plastic-contaminated water, we postulate that the plastics build up there,” Campen said. “We feed those crops to our livestock. We take the manure and put it back on the field, so there may be a sort of feed-forward biomagnification.”

Go vegan, I guess?

[–] [email protected] 11 points 5 hours ago (3 children)

Yes, and:

“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.”

[–] [email protected] 1 points 17 minutes ago

I think that's mostly an issue in America. Here in Europe you can always drink tap water.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 38 minutes ago

All the pipes are plastic too.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 hours ago

We're all gonna be drinking from the hose and eating peanut butter sandwiches out of aluminium foil wrappers like a bunch of gen-x kids.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

I am so glad I didn't bring any children into this world.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago) (1 children)

For real. And now I feel like people are either extremely stupid or just monsters for having kids.

Humanity is wasted. Its wild that I think I might actually favor a humanity ending natural disaster over continuing whatever the fuck humans are doing now.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 hours ago (2 children)

Edgy...

Despite having no desire to have kids, I'd much rather be born today than pretty much any time before the last few generations.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 40 minutes ago

That's the point I'm making, it's not about YOU, you are not the child being born. Your opinion doesn't matter to the kid being born.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 hour ago

That really depends on where you were born and what status you were born into. You could be born into a lot of places today that you would starve or live under miserable conditions.

[–] [email protected] 103 points 16 hours ago (29 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 minutes ago

Would my plastic water bottle (reusable) be a problem?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago

Does anyone knows of those brita filters that’s pretty much a plastic jar would leak as much microplastics as a regular bottle of water?

[–] [email protected] 14 points 11 hours ago

They won't think it was suicide if I keep drinking bottled water.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 hours ago (3 children)

The thing is that most of our piping is plastic. So how is tap water so much better?

[–] [email protected] 12 points 11 hours ago (3 children)

On average, disposable plastic bottles shed microplastics much more prolifically than plastic water piping.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

I've been drinking exclusively from a water bottle with a filter for a few years at this point and it feels less and less paranoid.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 11 hours ago (2 children)

Lmfao

We're totally boned.

How the fuck are micro plastics getting into the brain?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 hours ago

Via our blood

[–] [email protected] 10 points 11 hours ago (5 children)

More importantly, how are we getting them out?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 15 minutes ago

There's bacteria that can eat plastics. Lets hope they don't eat brain too.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 7 hours ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago

Bloodletting is making a comeback!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 hours ago

Most plastic melts at between 200°C and 320°C. So... Uh. Let's fire up those ovens, baby.

I suggest we start with Dupont and 3M executives to field test the removal process - since they're cool with testing their products on us.

Additional suggestions encouraged. Coke-Amatil? Tyre manufacturers?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 hours ago

Attach your brain to a 3D printer. Make some use of all that plastic and print your thoughts. /j

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[–] [email protected] 32 points 15 hours ago (11 children)

This is why I do the following once per fortnight:

  1. Obtain 1 liter of pharmaceutical-grade acetone.
  2. Heat the acetone to 150C to sterilize it.
  3. Cover the acetone with a sterile cover and let it cool to room temperature.
  4. While the acetone is cooling, drill a small hole in skull with a heat-sterilized drill bit. (Or re-use previously drilled skull port.)
  5. Once cooled, using a large syringe, inject 1 liter of sterile acetone directly into skull.
  6. Shake head around for 2 minutes, let sit for 30 minutes.
  7. After 30 minutes, attach new sterile needle to syringe and insert into skull port.
  8. 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.)

[–] [email protected] 15 points 12 hours ago

I'm looking forward to this ending up in some LLM's training data

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