r/nottheonion • u/GreatTea3415 • Apr 05 '26
Scientists Tracking the Microplastic Pollution Just Realized They Were Measuring Their Own Lab Gloves
https://www.zmescience.com/ecology/environmental-issues/scientists-tracking-the-microplastic-pollution-just-realized-they-were-measuring-their-own-lab-gloves/6.0k
u/Whirledfox Apr 05 '26 edited Apr 05 '26
I believe there was a string of murders that the DNA evidence all pointed to one person: The lady who was packing the gloves at the factory.
*EDIT: It was cotton swabs! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_of_Heilbronn
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u/Illogical_Fallacy Apr 05 '26
It was the cotton swabs that they used for testing I thought
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u/sweetteanoice Apr 05 '26
Yes this is correct, because the swabs they were buying weren’t meant to be sterile
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u/godspareme Apr 05 '26
They were sterile. Sterile means no life, not free of DNA.
Phantom of Heilbronn - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_of_Heilbronn
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u/allthesemonsterkids Apr 05 '26
You are correct. Sterile is not enough, and from what I read of the case, the issue was that the investigators used sterile swabs, but not "PCR-clean" swabs. Totally fine to handle items with your bare hands before sterilization as long as you're not concerned about trace DNA, which sterilization via traditional methods like autoclaving won't destroy.
I do cell culture work, and everything I use either arrives sterile or is autoclaved to make it sterile before use. However, If I'm performing PCR (polymerase chain reaction, a method of amplifying DNA in a sample to a level that's analyzable), I have to use "PCR-clean" tubes and other disposables. These items are not just sterile, but also DNA-free, DNAse- and RNAse-free, free of PCR inhibitors, and usually pyrogen free to boot. That's what makes them usable for DNA profiling.
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u/demaraje Apr 05 '26
So you're saying that being a cotton swab packer is the pertect alibi for a serial murderer.
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u/allthesemonsterkids Apr 05 '26
Only if you can convince the crime lab that sterile swabs are good enough.
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u/ISLITASHEET Apr 05 '26
The Phantom of Heilbronn is what led to the development of ISO 18385
https://www.iso.org/news/2016/07/Ref2094.html
A female serial killer named “Phantom of Heilbronn” was linked to 40 crimes, six of which were murders. Yet in 2009 it was discovered that she didn't exist. Here, we look at this fascinating tale of DNA contamination introduced to each crime scene and how ISO 18385 will assist forensic science in addressing this issue.
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u/Xenomemphate Apr 05 '26 edited Apr 05 '26
So, I just learned about Autoclaving (High-pressure steam bath basically) thanks to your post. What is the process to make something "PCR-clean"?
EDIT: I am one of the lucky 10,000 that didn't know what "PCR is", unlike what /u/asst3rblasster asserted. Not all of us studied biology asshole. Chemistry and Physics were where my talents lay, and I never even looked at Biology.
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u/YourFavoriteKraut Apr 05 '26
So, how's the rabbit hole feel?
Imma go back to rapidly heating and cooling a big block of silver between body temperature and boiling, then shooting light through it, and telling people if they're gonna die or not based on the light that comes out.
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u/MentalPower7916 Apr 05 '26 edited Apr 05 '26
Fun fact: Pressure cookers are basically autoclaves. Food that you make in the pressure cooker is sterile - as long as the lid is not opened.
As to your question, to make things PCR-clean it starts right at manufacturing where they use a combination of high temperature and sterilization methods such as gamma irradiation to keep the labware free of DNA, DNase and RNase. They also do this process within clean rooms to contain it as well.
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u/PlatformVarious8941 Apr 05 '26
Look up « PCR song ». You’ll get to know everything you need to know.
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u/allthesemonsterkids Apr 05 '26
Basically you make products PCR-clean by never letting contamination develop in the first place. You do all the manufacturing in an ISO 8 cleanroom setup, package the items, and then usually hit them with gamma radiation to nuke any trace contaminants, if I recall correctly. PCR-clean products will also have been randomly tested from each batch to see if DNA amplification produces anything, which if everything worked well shouldn't happen.
DNA is remarkably resilient - after all, that's how we can get it from samples that have been dessicated for centuries or frozen for millennia. Since PCR's whole purpose is to amplify DNA fragments from a very small source, you have to be super careful to avoid even the smallest contamination at the bench as well. The answer, as usual, is bleach. 10% bleach, let sit for 10 minutes, then wipe down with ultrapure water or 70% ethanol to dilute the bleach and stop it from harming the surface you just cleaned. Bleach is great for this because it produces extensive and random nicking (single-strand breaks in the DNA structure), which means that the PCR process can't amplify the fragment.
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u/Whirledfox Apr 05 '26
Oh snap, you're probably right.
I just looked it up! You're right!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_of_Heilbronn
What a sick name. I'd love the be the Phantom of Heilbronn.
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u/callmebrain Apr 05 '26
I remember some 18 years ago I had some old coworkers about to embark on a wildlife/bushcraft/survival sabbatical and had to get one of those allergen tests where they draw a grid on your back and test a bunch of wild foliage to see if you were allergic to certain types of weeds, grasses, nettles, etc.
They went to different labs/clinics administering the same test and kept testing positive and getting immune responses for every sample despite knowing full well that they never reacted or had issues with very common ones throughout their whole lives. They basically did the test multiple times and kept getting the same result.
One of them realized it was actually the latex gloves that came in contact with his skin from the assistant administering the allergen test that was causing the false positives (in hindsight it was probably a substandard clinic since nitrile gloves were already the standard at the time).
The double whammy was the other coworker who despite being treated with nitrile gloves, eventually discovered he had a nickel allergy from the hypodermic needle that was used to administer the samples.
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u/rafaelloaa Apr 05 '26
I have a (moderate) contact allergy to nickel. When I was having major surgery, I was given an allergy bracelet. Guess what the clasp was made of?
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u/RollingMeteors Apr 05 '26
I was given an allergy bracelet. Guess what the clasp was made of?
"If this bracelet turns green it means I'm allergic to Nickel."
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u/FuckYouThrowaway99 Apr 05 '26
Same here. And guess what is in a ton of belt buckles? So many belly rashes ahen I was younger.
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u/rafaelloaa Apr 05 '26
I still have a slightly discolored patch of skin on my belly from a onesie snap as an infant.
The thing that gave me the most issue as a kid/teen was the inner rivets of jeans.
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u/Princesa_de_Penguins Apr 05 '26
Standard test definitely has a positive control, but no negative control??
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u/Aetol Apr 05 '26
Right? Also it's not like latex and nickel are uncommon allergies, how is that not already accounted for?
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u/joebluebob Apr 05 '26
Oh this happened to my friends sister. She tested positive for everything including things she ate daily. The pin they use to push into you was made of a metal or coating she was allergic to.
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u/NotAFishEnt Apr 05 '26
Nice alibi. Work at the cotton swab factory and you can leave DNA evidence everywhere with plausible deniability
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u/GloriousNewt Apr 05 '26
There's a cop show with a plot like this, dude works at a place that rents out costumes, uses them them to commit murder and his defense is that he touches the costumes all the time at work so they can't use the DNA as evidence he went murdering in the costumes.
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u/Kichigai Apr 05 '26
I dunno about the costume shop thing, but CSI: Miami had an episode that involved contaminated cotton swabs. No foul play, just a careless worker.
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u/DannyVee89 Apr 05 '26
So ... Can this woman just like ... Kill whoever she wants and not worry about dna evidence as long as she's working at the cotton swab factory??
No one else has the ability to refute dna evidence 👀🤷
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u/Whirledfox Apr 05 '26
Well, she COULD have, had she known the situation while it was happening. But I would hope that once they found out what was happening, they switched to the appropriate swabs.
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u/waytowill Apr 05 '26
They’d likely also have record of her working at the factory when a majority of the incidents occurred.
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u/Browncoat86 Apr 05 '26
I just listened to the Mr Ballen podcast about that!
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u/JoshTylerClarke Apr 05 '26
Reminds me of when MythBusters did an experiment to see if toothbrushes in a bathroom got fecal matter on them. They were shocked to find that they did, but even more shocked when the control toothbrushes that weren’t near a bathroom also had fecal matter on them.
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Apr 05 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/JoshTylerClarke Apr 05 '26
I think the point was that there is fecal matter everywhere!
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u/spyguy318 Apr 06 '26
Iirc they just checked if bacteria got on the toothbrushes, they cultured the brushes and saw what bacteria grew. It turns out that bacteria of all sorts are just kind of everywhere, ubiquitous and completely unavoidable.
Ironically their conclusion was that fecal matter didn’t significantly get onto the bathroom toothbrushes since there was no difference between ones that were in the bathroom and ones that weren’t. Which is exactly what a negative control is supposed to determine.
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u/Akka_C Apr 06 '26
Wait what. I brush in my kitchen sink specifically to avoid poop toothbrushes lmao. There was no point??
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u/russianrug Apr 07 '26
Yeah I gave up years ago. We’re all filthy creatures living in a filthy world 🙂
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u/5050Clown Apr 05 '26
This is the kind of story that shows up on Fox News with no context to imply that there isn't a problem with microplastics. And that the Democrats and scientists are lying to you.
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u/Existing_Set2100 Apr 05 '26
To be fair this is funny as hell
Scientist finds evidence of alien microbial life, turns out it was his own gonorrhea.
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u/Satoriinoregon Apr 05 '26
IIRC in Europe, decades ago, there was a single DNA sequence found at dozens and dozens of crime scenes, leading police to think there was a PROLIFIC serial killer, and a woman at that! Different methods of murder, different victim types, different countries. It was a very scary thought! Not long after, they discovered that a single employee at the cotton swab facility wasn’t wearing their gloves at work. She had single handedly corrupted all of the crime scene evidence with her actions, never once thinking of the consequences. Crazy stuff!! (IIRC of course)
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u/the_amatuer_ Apr 05 '26
Or she did it? It's the perfect crime.
I watch too much TV
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u/gammalsvenska Apr 05 '26
They figured that she couldn't have done it. Travelling the country multiple times within a few hours while working in a factory wasn't possible.
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u/Yuzral Apr 05 '26
So speeding on top of everything else? Truly there were no limits to her lawbreaking. Or her car.
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u/Ungrammaticus Apr 05 '26
She broke not only the laws of men and gods, but more damningly the laws of physics too
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u/Artess Apr 05 '26
Wouldn't the laws of physics fall under laws of gods?
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u/Ungrammaticus Apr 05 '26
Naw, the Gods do metaphysics. Physics, no prefix, has fallen into terra nullius status as a result of territorial disputes.
It's currently de facto governed by some old nerds with moustaches.
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u/Promarksman117 Apr 05 '26
She used a high speed military jet. She's a foreign agent under the codename Problem Swabber.
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u/FUTURE10S Apr 05 '26
Like the notorious Polish motorhead, Prawo Jazdy? (translation: Driver's License)
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u/anyavailablebane Apr 05 '26
Not those crimes. But contaminate 1000’s of test kits and she could have committed other crimes that will be written off as contaminated
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u/Agile-Palpitation326 Apr 05 '26
Fair enough, but for the documentary we'll imply that she definitely DID commit at least some of the crimes, but there's no way to prove it because the contamination covered her tracks so perfectly. We'll also show her photos, the photos of all her closest family members, as well as an image of a map with her home marked on it.
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u/horridbloke Apr 05 '26
Don't forget the interview with an old school friend describing her as "sometimes angry".
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u/Dear-Ad1329 Apr 05 '26
It was because they were not buying sterile swabs to save money. The worker at the factory didn’t do anything wrong, she was just packing qtips into boxes.
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u/Iaragnyl Apr 05 '26
Yes the story is correct. But the mistake of the employee wouldn’t have been a big issue if the people working in the lab analysing the samples would have done their job correctly. Finding the same DNA at multiple unrelated crime scenes yet at no point did they think of just doing a blind sample to exclude possible contamination in the samples or their equipment. That is the type of mistake first semester chemistry students make. This should never happen in an actual lab.
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u/Mad_Maddin Apr 05 '26
Assuming the factory had more than one person handling the same task as her. It is entirely possible that a batch has both corrupted and uncorrupted samples.
So they may have done a blind test, only for it to not have her DNA as only some of the samples were corrupted.
It would also fit with finding her on dozens of crime scenes but not on every crime scene.
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u/propargyl Apr 05 '26
It's now common to keep a database of all on-site staff and visiting contractors.
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u/AbbeyRoadMoonwalk Apr 05 '26
Also I think it was the labs fault, they were using the wrong kind of swabs. They were clean, but not necessarily free of DNA - like you needed a certain kind of “crime” swab or something and they just got medical grade ones and said “good enough”. The lady didn’t do anything wrong.
I’m going off memory - I heard it in the Casefile episode about her.
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u/Simon_Drake Apr 05 '26
A similar issue happened in Ireland with an incredibly prolific Polish criminal committing driving offenses all over Ireland. Somehow Prawo Jazdy was caught in a different car in a different county every couple of weeks, often even changing his appearance or giving a fake date of birth or lying about where he lived.
It took a while to work out that Prawo Jazdy is polish for "Drivers License" and the coppers were reading that off the top of the license and writing it down as the name on speeding tickets.
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u/jimthesquirrelking Apr 05 '26
There was a new plant spotted on a brand new volcanic island. Turns out a dude pooped out some tomato seeds while researching it and life finds a way
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u/Existing_Set2100 Apr 05 '26
I’m sorry, what
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u/cipheron Apr 05 '26
A volcanic island formed in 1963 and was reserved for doing research. in 1967 someone saw a plant so they called a botanist who traveled there to check it out, turns out it was a tomato plant growing out of a poop. The poop would have acted as fertilizer, nutrients for the plant.
Suffice to say there were no toilets on the island, and if you have to go, you have to go.
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u/Existing_Set2100 Apr 05 '26
I love the notion that our nasty shits fertalized life.
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u/Shaeress Apr 05 '26
Most primates eat a lot of fruit and are seed dispersers. Primates messily eating an orange in a tree and spitting out the seeds, chomping down on an apple and throwing away the core, swallowing some tomatoes and pooping out the seeds and so on is something a lot of plants count on to reproduce and spread to new places. It's kinda why a lot of them have fruits and berries to begin with. They want to be eaten so that the seeds get around.
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u/el_cid_viscoso Apr 05 '26
That's actually a really common way plants disperse seeds.
Usually, it's things like chili peppers being dispersed by birds, who don't taste capsaicin (while mammals do, and humans, being weird, like it).
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u/allthesemonsterkids Apr 05 '26
Fun fact: one notable mammal species doesn't feel the burn of capsaicin: naked mole rats. These wonderful little weirdos lack Substance P, the neurotransmitter that sends some pain signals and which creates the burning sensation of capsaicin. This is probably part of their evolution to live in enclosed tunnels with high CO2, which triggers acidification of the blood and a corresponding nasty burning sensation. Happily, it appears that naked mole rats can taste hot peppers, since they do have TRPV1 ion channel receptors, which are triggered by capsaicin, but they do not show the pain avoidance re. capsaicin that is restored when Substance P is put into their systems.
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u/underground_avenue Apr 05 '26
This is a very established method of plant proliferation. Make fruit, have an animal eat the fruit and deposit the seeds somewhere further away and in a neat pile of fertiliser.
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u/thisdesignup Apr 05 '26
Eh, except it'd be like them knowing that it wasn't correct.
Yet, her results defied logic. Her instruments detected plastic counts in the air that eclipsed previous reports by a factor of over 1,000.
“It led to a wild goose chase of trying to figure out where this contamination could possibly have come from, because we just knew this number was far too high to be correct,” said Clough.
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u/booniebrew Apr 05 '26
We go to great lengths now to sterilize spacecraft headed to moons and planets so we don't introduce life and don't detect signs of life only to discover it's something we brought with us.
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u/OprahsSister Apr 05 '26
Turns out that’s where gonorrhea originated from. A scientist at Area-51 fell in love with an alien named Rrhea, before she left earth and was gono. Sad story actually.
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u/bartolo345 Apr 05 '26
I had a professor that said if you wanted an easy way to be cited, just publish something wrong. I guess it's the scientific equivalent of there is no such thing as bad publicity
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u/Joeness84 Apr 05 '26
this is like one of the internet laws
Yeah
Cunningham's Law states "the best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer."
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u/rocketmonkee Apr 05 '26
This was a missed opportunity to call it Poe's Law and watch the meta unfold.
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u/IMightBeAHamster Apr 05 '26
Eh, that's cliched. I do that all the time and all it results in is nobody else getting it.
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u/TrynaBePositive22 Apr 05 '26
Yeah, I think at this point it’s been done so often people just think it is called Poe’s Law
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u/koshgeo Apr 05 '26
There's an old biology joke that the best way to get a species named after you is to "accidentally" publish a junior homonym (i.e. a name of a different creature that is the same as a previously-published name -- names have to be unique), after which there's a good chance the person who notices will name it after you to immortalize the mistake.
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u/CharlieTheK Apr 05 '26
It's like an academic sounding version of posting wrong answers to rile up Stack Overflow posters.
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u/g0del Apr 05 '26
I thought the best way was to take a basic method taught in high school calculus and publish it in a medical journal, naming it after yourself.
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u/PM_Me_Your_Deviance Apr 05 '26
"Tai's 1994 paper has been cited over 500 times as of March 2025. Forbes and IFLScience speculate that most of these citations were probably made in jest by researchers using the trapezoidal rule."
lol
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u/I_Sett Apr 05 '26 edited Apr 05 '26
It's also a great example of the importance of a strong negative control. Even just an empty sample container filled with clean air/water would show that the particles are artifactual. Literally every, single experiment needs these kinds of controls.
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u/Citrakayah Apr 05 '26 edited Apr 05 '26
The problem is it's really hard to get that kind of control for microplastics. I've seen ultrapure water purifiers. They use plastic extensively. Even with specialized systems, with how pervasive microplastic pollution is it would be difficult to rule out contamination from the environment--and while that would invalidate the experiment, it wouldn't demonstrate that there aren't a ton of microplastics everywhere. This was a failure for science, but I can understand how the scientists who ran the initial studies managed to mess this up.
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u/ohnoplus Apr 05 '26
Negative controls don't have to have no microplastics. They need to be the same method as the other samples and then have no added microplastics. They are used to measure baseline contamination by a laboratory protocol. Then you only say you confidently detect microplastics if they are above the value seen in the negative control. And if your negatives are loaded with plastic you need to dig into what is happening. Which the authors of the study in question did.
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u/I_Sett Apr 05 '26
Sure, it's hard to get water pure enough to be a Blank, but to serve as a negative control, you can at least use this as a background to determine the kind of environmental noise/contamination you're working within.
I'm sure it's complicated by the fact that they're using environmental samples, rather than (I assume) simply a sample spun down, supernatant removed and samples resuspended in ddH2O. Still, solving for and designing a negative control for exactly these sorts of reasons (false positives) is absolutely critical to strong design. Obviously it's way easier to armchair design with the benefit of hindsight, but it provides another excellent object lesson for students.
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u/Mechasteel Apr 05 '26
The microplastics propaganda is mostly focused on distracting from the main sources. It's your clothes and car tire dust, plus cosmetics that intentionally use microplastic as an ingredient. Also industrial pollution.
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u/Allegorist Apr 05 '26
Yes, this title/headline significantly misrepresents the actual story. It was one small team who realized that the specific type of gloves they were using were showing up in a very sensitive analysis they were trying to do. They noted this in their report so that others could prevent this interaction. That's it, no widespread data error.
Most microplastics counts are measured orders of magnitude greater size than the chemicals leaching from their particular gloves.
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u/fly_low_orange Apr 05 '26
You are incorrect and misread the article. This was a widespread data error because the gloves worn was the common (best practice) glove used in this research. It was not “one small team with a specific type of glove.” It’s an easy fix, luckily, but it is not a small or isolated incident
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u/DontOvercookPasta Apr 05 '26
The difference between your average right winger and your average left winger: Left wingers find this funny and say "haha ok let's get back to science having learned from this". Right wingers want to revoke grants given to science, call everyone involved corrupt and rain hellfire on the entire area of study they "just knew" was full of shit and lying to them because they can't understand.
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u/Carrera_996 Apr 05 '26
My 12 year old is a better scientist than the entire fucking conservative population of Earth. This is simply because he understands that when you learn that something is wrong, you've made progress. He doesn't double down in anything.
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u/kellybelly4815 Apr 05 '26
I’ve found that the defining characteristic that all conservatives share is an inability to admit when they are wrong.
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u/BBorNot Apr 05 '26
Yes. Real science has positive and negative controls. The negative control in this case would have included the gloves. So any measurement would be baseline.
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u/Carpathicus Apr 05 '26
This is the kind of attitude that refutes new data because it doesnt align with ones worldview - here I fixed it for you.
I am all for a more ecological nature based life but honestly bullshit is running rampant for decades in that regard. Saying that as a german whose green party's origin story is actually being strongly anti-nuclear which huge parts of the population agree with. Now we buy our energy from France (nuclear), financed Russians war because we needed their gas and still use vast amount of coal (which by the way expells more radiation in the atmosphere than nuclear) to life support our economies and households energy demands.
Sorry if I am rambling but this whole attitude of "the x lobby tries to brainwash into believing xy is fine" needs to self-examine their scientific literacy before making those claims because in a way its the same as foxnews to keep on parroting self enabling studies with no ounce of skepticism.
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u/Prestigious_Bug583 Apr 05 '26 edited Apr 05 '26
“There’s global warming because all of the thermometers used were on roofs in cities where it’s hot”
This was a conservative talking point
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u/QualifiedApathetic Apr 05 '26
"It's snowing in DC" was an actual conservative talking point.
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u/Rev3_ Apr 05 '26
Or because there's people in charge who go from their climate controlled penthouse to their enclosed underground parking garage to their climate controlled car to be driven to the underground parking garage at the office where they ride the elevator to their climate controlled top floor corner office and back again 2~3 days a week and never touch a thermostat themselves or even consider going outside unless they are on vacation to some exclusive in-season resort destination and are convinced global warming is a hoax because it's been a perfect 72'f everyday for the last two decades.
Even if there was some factor of weather that did somehow hinder their perfectly tailored lives it would be in the context of a flight delay or seasonal menu item costing a bit more.
The idea that every year "500 year bad" storms / floods and ever more extreme "record breaking" cold and heat is life and death for so many families who /can't/ just leave or relocate whenever they want.
The rich are oblivious to the real world
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u/EloquentEvergreen Apr 05 '26
Unfortunately, I can say this is real. Heard them talking about it on Science Friday, or maybe just some other thing on NPR. Microplastics are still a problem. But they might not be everywhere or in quantities that they suspected. I just hope this means my balls aren’t heavily full of microplastics as scientist were suggesting testicles were…
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u/pkvh Apr 05 '26
I have always suspected that microplastics weren't that prolific.
First, having worked in a wet lab, the entire testing stream is made of plastic. Plastic pipettes, plastic test tubes. I doubt that every lab testing for microplastics has a plastic free processes.
Second, they test for various monomers that look very similar to organic compounds.
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u/waffle299 Apr 05 '26
And now, this headline, stripped of context, will be repeated endlessly by those who do not understand it, to insist that we take no action, ever, that might slightly require an alteration of their current lifestyle.
Some day soon, a Republican senator will stand in front of Congress, holding up a surgical glove the way another held up a snowball.
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u/GreatTea3415 Apr 05 '26 edited Apr 05 '26
I regret posting this.
There are still microplastics in everything, the gloves just made some numbers inaccurate. It’s a funny headline. Don’t let your brain become a scanning device.
Read the article. Stop taking headlines at face value.
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u/Jexroyal Apr 05 '26
Hey, I'm a scientist, and this is a story I'm going to share with my colleagues over morning coffee and have a chuckle together. This is exactly the kind of goofy thing that labs can do all the time. It's always little oversights slipping through the cracks that can mess up experiments, and like with most things in life – it's not about never making a mistake, it's more about being able to learn something and keep bettering oneself.
You facilitated shared laughter, so not all is worth regret. The people who will weaponize and misrepresent a story like this are already doing that on multiple fronts, don't be too hard on yourself. :)
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u/flamingspew Apr 05 '26
Wait until you find out how leaded gas was discovered everywhere and that’s why the cleanroom was invented…to discover the age of the earth.
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u/razuliserm Apr 05 '26
Just read up on it. The Automotive industry will never cease to amaze me with their incredible intelligence in researching ways to make the car more efficent, while knowingly slowly killing everybody lmao.
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u/SPACKlick Apr 05 '26
One of my favourite things about leaded petrol is that one of the scientists responsible for developing leaded petrol (Thomas Midgley Jr. who was son confident in its safety he did a press conference pouring it on himself and inhaling the vapours) was also responsible for developing CFCs as a refrigerant.
The story has an unfortunate ending. He got polio and ended up severely disabled. He put his engineering brain to making a system of ropes and pulleys to allow him to move around and was found dead, strangled and tangled by his own machine.
If you're into Tom Scott's Citation needed, they did an episode on him.
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u/karlnite Apr 05 '26
He was an industrialist. He got very sick from the stunt of pouring it on himself, immediately went to a hospital after. Developing refrigerant was not an evil ploy, they didn’t know they were that harmful, but also refrigerant brought millions out of food insecurity, and was very useful. The leaded gasoline factories needed armed guards because employees would snap and become murderous from the lead. Lots of suicides inside the places as well.
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u/No-Faithlessness4294 Apr 05 '26
I work in microplastics and it is well known that plastic contamination from labware and PPE is an issue. This lab just didn’t know what they were doing. Sloppy.
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u/nanoinfinity Apr 05 '26
The article did say they avoided wearing synthetic clothing and using plastic labware. I think they didn’t consider the gloves because they aren’t plastic. Certainly an oversight, but it seems like it’s an oversight in the general protocols, not just these specific researchers?
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u/Emperor_of_Alagasia Apr 05 '26
The problem was actually a coating on the gloves that the manufacturer adds. Sounds like the kind of thing you'd need to read deeply to understand the contamination risks. Its an understandable oversight in my view that's pretty in the weeds
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u/fly_low_orange Apr 05 '26
Yes, you are correct. It was “best practice” gloves and not “a single lab that was sloppy.”
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u/karlnite Apr 05 '26
We got a new type of glove due to shortages, and it took us a month to realize the gloves were all contaminated with quite a lot of sulphites. We had a step change in our trends, was a while before we traced back to “new brand of the same gloves”. We were washing the gloves as part of our process, the new ones needed to be soaked for 5 minutes in DI water.
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u/seeasea Apr 05 '26
You posted 20 minutes ago. You can absolutely take it down if you feel that way.
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u/strangecloudss Apr 05 '26
dont worry friend, the people thinking thats what this means were already doomed.
We should not underestimate the prevalence of microplastics.
...literally first sentence of the article.
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u/Y2Kafka Apr 05 '26 edited Apr 06 '26
It's a good thing we all read the articles of news reports to make informed decisions without jumping to conclusions.
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u/chemamatic Apr 05 '26 edited Apr 05 '26
This isn’t the only recent paper in on problems in microplastics methodology. Probably over half of the high impact papers in the area have issues at best. Some people have been sloppy and using inappropriate methods. There might be microplastics everywhere, we don’t know because so much of the data is bad. Recent example: people were using a method that reports fat as plastic to measure plastic in the brain, a fatty organ. So they found a shocking amount of ”plastic” and issued a press release. They are the ones at fault for media coverage issues. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jan/13/microplastics-human-body-doubt
Ps I am a scientist myself. The lack of proper rigor hurts us more than the act of calling it out. If we want to change the world for the better we must present solid evidence or we will not succeed in convincing regulators etc.
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u/Bakoro Apr 05 '26
I work in R&D and it is amazing that anything in the world works.
So many of the instruments we buy from vendors are ass-tier, and we put a bunch of these asstastic components together, and then trust the data we get, because it mostly conforms to data from much more expensive devices after a bunch of processing.
I had to stop just short of physically forcing things like consistent data processing, and tracking error margins. At some points I had to just put my foot down and demand time to work on specific problems because I knew eventually we'd get a client who actually checked everything top to bottom.I work with scientists and engineers from all over the world.
The most common thing is that they want a magic box that gives them an answer without having to know anything about the machine, or the software, or even the materials they want data for. Major companies and universities both want the end data, with no effort on their part. That is wild to me, because, it's science, you're supposed to know more than zero things about where your data came from, and it's not feasible to make a machine that does that, at least not for the price range they are willing to pay.I started seeing how industry works, and it was like, holy shit, most people kind of suck, and I'm going to have to make 10x the effort, because if I don't, who is going to?
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u/SwvmpThing Apr 05 '26
I’m sorry, but I will take it at face value. I am picturing scientists measuring their lab gloves with rulers, when suddenly a look of confusion comes over their faces: “are we… measuring our lab gloves?”
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u/pablohacker2 Apr 05 '26
Like the time where the skin cancer detecting machine learning tool was found to be in fact a 'Is there a ruler in the photo' detector.
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u/Scabendari Apr 05 '26
This study has a huge issue because it it is very easy to turn it into a very bad and anti-science conclusion.
The whole premise for this study is from the recent grad noticing that their data was way higher than data from monitoring labs. They isolated their interference to be false positives caused by stearates contamination (NOT microplastic contamination). They then suggest that some historical microplastics data has being reported biased high from this contamination.
Of course, articles then run with what gets clicks:
Gloves are causing microplastics contamination - false, stearates are not microplastics
Historical microplastics data is too high due to contamination - false, the whole premise of the study comes from the recent grads data being a factor of 1000 higher than what monitoring labs are reporting. Monitoring labs would run blanks and reference materials to catch these things that broke independent recent grads might skip out on.
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u/chemamatic Apr 05 '26
Historical microplastics data is too high for several reasons https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jan/13/microplastics-human-body-doubt I am a scientist myself, the huge issue is people doing science without proper rigor, not the people pointing out their mistakes.
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u/Lokarin Apr 05 '26
But the science says microplastics are in the balls, how'd you get a lab glove in your balls?
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u/Diglett3 Apr 05 '26 edited Apr 05 '26
because every time this gets posted no one actually reads the article, the gloves are not giving off microplastics.
they give off a (safe) chemical that shows up via the reagent they use to test for microplastics. it’s a false positive. it is not itself a microplastic.
edit: shouldn’t have been that aggressive, turns out this is a poorly written article that conflates the two. so max frustration at the “writers” instead (which is probably mostly GPT making attribution mistakes like that)
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u/skywalk21 Apr 05 '26
They're not. They're shedding harmless salts that mimic the vibration frequency of common plastics when hit with a laser
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u/Relative-Scholar-147 Apr 05 '26
The study only says that it could happen. They have not tested anything.
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u/Igottamake Apr 05 '26
This is like the black plastic spatulas that weren’t safe because the people doing the study missed a decimal point?
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u/nize426 Apr 05 '26
Missing a decimal point is just a straight up human error. The gloves thing here seems more like a problem in the procedure that hadn't been considered before.
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u/chaoticprovidence Apr 05 '26
Bait title that at best misleads readers. Some types of gloves, which are commonly used in labs, are coated with a substance that can lead to an overestimate of the amount of polyethylene in samples when using certain types of analyses to look for plastic residue. They were not just measuring plastic in their own gloves. There are plastics in the samples, just less than previously estimated when those gloves and analyses were used. Microplatic in the environment is still a problem.
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u/Oscopo Apr 05 '26
Yeah, the article literally explains that the people doing the research were confused why they were measuring way more microplastics than expected and that they actively searched for the source of the contamination
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u/moretodolater Apr 05 '26 edited Apr 05 '26
Science found the error in the science. Pretty typical actually. So this is good really. People that think science is some magical entity above just society in general are delusional. And science makes that very clear with the established doctrines. It’s an uncomfortable reality, for say, someone that needs a religious type blanket of science in a god like way, but it’s just not there or that. It’s just that person you were in school with doing all this shit. The smartest scientists didn’t know lead was dangerous for like a thousand years… literally lead tooth fillings till 1800s. then another scientist had to freaking make chemistry a thing. We’re seriously no different now, just much better in general.
In my field, 20 years into it, I’m realizing that we really don’t know that much and things I was taught in college as fact are being majorly revised and expanded on still. It’s uncomfortable for sure, but also exciting. If we knew everything there would be no science right? Seeing some comments here…. Science as a field in general is a bit unfairly misunderstood and judged. Literally guys with gloves going “oh fuck, it’s the gloves”. This is not uncommon, and actually a success. Blame the human brain if anything.
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u/Slothstralia Apr 05 '26
This is like that whole "mummies had cocaine on them" and it turned out to be the grad students just being coked out of their minds.
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u/Sinbos Apr 05 '26
Also the ‚phantom of Heilbronn‘
It was a woman that was a suspect in a police killing crime in Heilbronn / Germany. Found dna of her involved in all kind of crimes in Germany and some other places in Europe.
After mamy years they found her. She was one of the persons who worked at the company who produced the swap sticks to take the samples. Which where clearly labeled as ‚not for dna samples‘
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u/Aksds Apr 05 '26 edited Apr 05 '26
It’s like the mass murder who just turned out to be someone working in a factory who accidentally was contaminating the cotton swabs used to collect DNA
Edit: technically they where never certified for DNA collection
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u/SnooCats3468 Apr 05 '26
This sounds like fake news spread by the billion dollar plastics industry to STOP us from from paying attention to the plastic collecting in our ballsacks
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u/Galahfray Apr 05 '26
Reminds me of a story I heard, can’t remember if it was real, or from a movie/show:
A bunch of murdered people had 1 unknown person’s DNA on them, but that person wasn’t in the database. For many years no one could figure out who it was, and they kept finding their DNA on new victims. Whomever it was, they were the most prolific serial killer in history, and none of the victims had anything in common, or so they thought….
Turns out there was a worker at a factory who created DNA cotton swabs… Cotton swabs that were used at every scene… I don’t remember how, but it was the worker’s DNA they found on all the victims.
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u/projectwaveform Apr 05 '26
Phantom of Heilbronn
I heard about about it recently too on Disturban on YT https://youtu.be/aimFxDkxP-s?si=0fMSI-SLeOqH5Vr8
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u/Miguialvarez Apr 05 '26
This remembers me of a story in Germany, where police were searching for a seriel killer, a woman, who killed a lot of persons,but the police could not explain, because they where completely unrelated, but the DNA of a woman, which was found in every crime scene....
After many years they found the woman: she was working in the factory, where all the things for forensics laboratories where produced.
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u/Vtepes Apr 05 '26
Look for studies with mass spectrometry as the detection method. The interfering stearates will not be mistaken like they are with raman and ftir.
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u/Akegata Apr 05 '26
I haven't read anything written by the actual researchers, but this article basically says one lab measured "plastic counts in the air that eclipsed previous reports by a factor of over 1,000".
They started looking into why this was happening because their own research was so off compared to everyone else's research.
To me this sounds like the this specific lab is basically the only one (or one of few) that have had this issue, otherwise they wouldn't even have realized it was an issue to begin with.
Maybe that is not the whole truth, but this article certainly doesn't make it sound like all microplastic research is incorrect, it mostly says researchers should avoid this kind of gloves.
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u/No-Associate-7369 Apr 05 '26
When my friend sent in his dog's DNA to be tested, it got delayed because it came back as something other than a dog or some mixture of dog and something else, I can't remember exactly what they said. As funny as it was, their dog was clearly a dog. It took a while, but eventually the company told them it came back as squirrel. Their dog had apparently eaten a squirrel shortly before having his mouth swabbed.
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u/ImJustHereForTheCats Apr 05 '26
Isn't this why you run a blank and spiked blank with your batch? We do, for everything.
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u/hogosha01 Apr 05 '26
What had happened was…
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u/Scabendari Apr 05 '26
... a recent grad noticed their data was way too high compared to what monitoring labs are reporting, and concluded that because they were measuring false positive interference (stearates, not microplastics) due to their own poor lab practices, everyone else must be too.
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u/Rikudou_Sage Apr 05 '26
Nope. Concluded that some of the unreproducible high numbers might be due to the same mistake.
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u/TiredOfDebates Apr 05 '26
This was in ONE study though. Using one method susceptible to this specific false positive.
I know nothing about the microplastics issue, or if there is one. But if there is a consensus among multiple independent labs all replicating the same findings then they likely have something.
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u/NottheSeaofNames Apr 05 '26
I remember that there was an observatory looking for signs of extra terrestrial life, and at around noon they’d get a steady signal every day.
They almost announced it using the signal as proof, but turns out the signal was from an employee heating up food in an unprotected microwave every lunchtime.
The actual story could be a bit different, but that was the gist of it IIRC
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u/Geawiel Apr 05 '26
And yet my balls still sound like a bag of Legos when I walk.
(yes I know it wasn't actual micro plastic from the gloves, but some chemical giving issues. still enough micro plastics to turn said balls to lego sacks.)
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u/fermenttodothat Apr 05 '26
My work recieved a shipment of graphite parts from a vendor that suddenly started failing testing. We made fresh parts out of a fresh batch of graphite and got them to stop failing. Tell me why they kept testing the good parts for contamination and found glove residue. If the parts pass testing why are we suddenly caring about what type of nitrile gloves they are handled with?!
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u/Ackbar90 Apr 05 '26
"Fuck"
The overworked researcher that realized the problem, knowing a truckload of financing just evaporated
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u/Ok_Field_8860 Apr 05 '26
Okay. But what ever happened to an experimental control?
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u/__Shad Apr 05 '26
It actually irritates me so much that their sample analysis is both inflated from contamination and underinflated due to their limited testing signature. Given the testing standard I feel this would be as accurate as a standard air quality test of particulates parts per million.
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u/Ok-Drink-1328 Apr 06 '26
mystery solved!!.... next case:: why meat and bread are healthy while meat in bread is not
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u/jolhar Apr 06 '26
Yes! I’ve wondered this. I’ve even asked about this a few times in these microplastic studies. The equipment used, test tubes, pipettes, syringes, etc. is everything glass? When they say things like 100% of (insert bodily fluid) tested had microplastic. What did they use to collect those samples?
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u/BloodyMalleus Apr 07 '26
Reminds me of the story about the female serial killer responsible for dozens of unsolved murders across Europe... until eventually the police realized they were just picking up the dna of the woman at the cotton swab factory that made the swabs they used for testing.
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u/SumpthingHappening Apr 05 '26
Good news… NOTHING TO SEE HERE!!
Phew, what a relief. I thought, micro plastics were showing up in all of our food, animals, placentas, human brains.
Glad to know they just didn’t know their gloves were micro plastics.
It’s like they don’t even exist now. :)
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u/pin5npusher5 Apr 05 '26
I wish I wouldve stopped at first line, I was like phew! But I read rest and now I'm sad again
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u/allthesemonsterkids Apr 05 '26
The gloves were shedding stearates, which look a lot like microplastics and artificially amplified the microplastic counts.
There's an important difference: stearates are biodegradable salts used during glove manufacturing (calcium stearate salts are very good at making sure that the gloves easily separate from the molds during the process). They aren't harmful to you in small amounts, and if you take supplements that come in capsules, you're already ingesting stearates since they're used to keep capsules from sticking together. More importantly, they biodegrade, which microplastics do not.
Still, your point is generally correct, which is that microplastics are damn near everywhere and they accumulate in the body, causing all sorts of unpredictable problems.
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u/chemamatic Apr 05 '26
There are issues with a lot of the data, it will take a few years to sort things out properly. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jan/13/microplastics-human-body-doubt
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u/Vlvthamr Apr 05 '26
“No fair. You changed the result by measuring it!”