August 11, 2025 — Here’s something to ponder. Floating in the North Atlantic, there are more metric tons of nanoplastics than the combined mass of all mammals living on dry land. That’s a lot. This observation comes from a recent study in the journal Nature. Unfortunately, we cannot be certain of the impact of this ubiquitous pollution on human […]
July 14, 2025 — Inundated. We are inundated with 16,235 chemicals present in the plastics filling our environment, says a new report in Nature. This meticulous inventory tells us that a subset of those, more than 4,200 of them, are chemicals of concern. The concern springs from one or more of the following properties. They migrate out of the […]
April 10, 2025 — It’s a fact. We are eating, drinking, and breathing microplastics. They are accumulating in our bodies – even in our brains. It took painstaking work to figure that out, but even more challenging is the task of nailing down the health effects of all those microplastics. Researchers are doing their best to figure this out. […]
February 6, 2025 — From the category of stuff that can’t be good. a study in Nature Medicine this week documents a spoonful of microplastics accumulating in an typical human brain. Alexander Nihart and colleagues used diverse methods to detect microplastics in various tissues (kidney, liver, and brain) of deceased individuals from 2016 and 2024. They found these particles […]
August 25, 2024 — When neuroscientists coined the phrase brain plasticity, they were certainly not thinking about microplastics accumulating in our brains. But unfortunately, it seems this is a phenomenon with implications we need to study. New NIH-funded research, published as a preprint, suggests these tiny particles are building up at an alarming rate. But it does not tell […]
January 13, 2024 — A new study this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science tells us that every bottle of water we’re drinking has hundreds of thousands of nanoplastics. Should we care? A Blank Slate, Tough to Study This study is important simply because it fills a void in knowledge about how much these nanoplastics are […]
July 18, 2023 — Barbie Girl (the song) told us life in plastic is fantastic, but the knowledge that we’re swimming in microplastics gives us reason for second thoughts. These tiny particles of plastic are accumulating in the oceans (even the Arctic), in the air, in the soil, in our food, and even in our bodies. This is an emerging […]
