A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
I remember when I found out that shit was plastic. I always assumed they were organic material of some kind, like the body scrubs with the crushed up walnut shell in it (which probably has fucking microplastic in it, too). So disgusting.
This is why we need to change how shit works. It shouldn't go: company does some shit > fall out > government steps in. It should go: company has an idea > must get permission first from environmental agencies
Nah corporations really don't give a shit at all, like all chewing gum is literally just plastic too and sheds tons of microplastics into your mouth as you chew it.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/rethink-chewing-gum-habit-essentially-plastic/
Plastic is an organic material though, so your assumption was correct.
The difference is in the definition or organic. When the average person thinks organic, they mean something that is or used to be alive. When a scientist think organic, they're talking about carbon compounds.
Plastic are made from fossil fuels which are from primordial plants. So still organic according to your definition. Just a few hundred million years since it was alive.
Plastic gotta be this age's lead/quicksilver.
Wtf is this meme border?
bordering on insanity
It's that bullshit when they take a vertically oriented picture/video, stretch it and blur it to a 4:3 ratio, and center the content over it.
Imo a waste of bandwidth and computer power for people who can't cope with the idea of vertical content on a horizontal screen, on a platform primarily accessed by phones anyway.
Don’t like thinking about how much of that probably made it to my brain, organs, and muscles :)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-024-03453-1
This study released last year based on samples from cadavers suggests there’s enough in your brain to make a plastic spoon
"this is not what we meant by brain plasticity"
Damn.. yeah those samples suggest ~6–8mg of plastic per gram of sample tissue in the brains from 2024 😟 That would be like 10 grams in an entire adult brain if the distribution is even.
“Thankfully” it looks like the brain has the highest concentration of all studied organs 🙃
Sometimes I feel like my brain is a plastic spoon already
It's not what microplasitcs are! Does anyone knows what micro is at this point?
Microbeads are manufactured solid plastic particles of less than one millimeter in their largest dimension.[1] They are most frequently made of polyethylene but can be of other petrochemical plastics such as polypropylene and polystyrene. They are used in exfoliating personal care products, toothpastes, and in biomedical and health-science research.[2]
To add to this, the definition of microplastic is less than 5mm. So yes, 1mm microbeads are microplastics.
Millibeads
Centibeads🐛
If these aren't microplastics, what are?
"Micro" just means "small" in this case and doesn't mean "microscopic" or have anything to do with "micrometer".
The definition of "microplastic" according to NOAA: "Microplastics are small plastic pieces less than five millimeters long".
The problem with that, is that if you include everything "small" in the definition, the word loses all it's meaning, feeble as it is already.
The word microplastic was introduced to describe not just any small piece of trash, but specifically that very small, invisible, pieces of plastics that are, as it turned out, everywhere, in the air, in the water, in our food, in our blood, even in space. If you add just small pieces of rubbish to it, we remove all the sense from the word, and will need another one.
1x10^-6 m.
Used to?
Chalk one up for the good old US of A. Gotta take our wins where we can get em.
I used to use a facial scrub with the plastic beads. I look back and it's like what the fuck, but at the time it was fine. Sorry world.
Just mineral or ground rocks work just as well. I hate my wife’s soft face scrub, i need that shit that feels like I’m scrubbing my face with sandpaper, to exfoliate well. They sell one that has ground up lava rock, i love that shit, and it makes me wonder why anyone ever thought plastic bits was a good idea
I feel like it's just capitalism doing a capitalism. People are self-conscious about their skin, so you can sell them all kinds of crap.
Even a basic washcloth does a decent job with exfoliating, if you use it regularly. Rub your face dry with a scruffy towel, if you need more than that.
But of course, there's hardly any money to be made with reasonably priced products, so you won't see TV ads for them.
Oh I'd somehow forgotten this era
That shit was in everything non solid for like 2 years
Reasons we need more oversight and regulations for these corporate snake oil salesmen. This shit should be a crime against humanity and every damn company that put that shit into their products should be abolished.
You know that old saying: If it's stupid but it works it's not stupid? This is the proof that it is incorrect.
That's not micro though?
No, but these beads pretty much go straight into the local waterways where they can very quickly break down into micro plastics. All so a human didn't have to use a tool like a brush or a loofa to scrub themselves. Convenience at any cost.
