I fucking hate lemmy now, you are just reddit with a sense of undeserved elitism.
This is a serious as fuck problem and all that anyone replies with are jokes and shitposts.
This is fucking /c/science, not /c/sciencememes
But none of you care especially the mods, so I’m just blocking every one of you.
edit: There’s an entire subthread here that is nothing but masturbation jokes, which of course the mods ignore.
Fuck lemmy and its shitstain mod team same as the reddit mods but with worse hygiene. At least on reddit they keep /r/science clean
scrolling in the comment section of this news article, i’ve only seen people either being concerner/shocked, and some sarcastically talking about recycling or something. Nothing about masturbation.
And if your criticism of lemmy is that it’s being reddit with elitism, then why try to gatekeep the way people are going to react to an article on c/science? Are we all supposed to have degrees in chemistry or biology before making a comment?
Believe it or not people take heavy news a million different ways and react differently. People ending up making a masturbation joke after discussing microplastics in testicles (i assume this is what happened) harm nothing and no one.
People having a laugh isn’t the problem.
There is a real problem with the thread format of social media however.
My proof is I can’t find the “in this discussion relevant” thread of masturbation jokes because time has moved on and so did the discussion. [Edit: your comment is only 1h old, so not sure whats up]
We need a much better way to organize our speech and discussions because a single scroll page sorted by time, or contextless votes ain’t doing it.
I actually noticed that some of my comments are reacted very different towards depending on the time of day, what side of planet earth is awake at the time.
There is an argument to be had that certain troll farms love to drown discussions in shitposts and maybe we should be more mindful of the patterns.
But to say we should crack down on any form of jokes, which are an important part of our human expression that goes too far, thats what i disliked about r/science
I’m so glad blocks are free.
Obligatory: The Planet is Fine - George Carlin
Peertube - https://kolektiva.media/w/37198b73-f7f9-4036-aa30-bb2da4763eda
googletube - Kmo8sh77G6YI find little shards of plastic in the vegetables from the supplier at work quite often. Sometimes I plate a dish and spot a bit of blue where it shouldn’t be.
for anyone working with acrylic paint, this stuff is plastic so it’s best not to just chuck it down your sink.
There is a way to filter the plastics https://www.jacksonsart.com/blog/2023/09/28/acrylic-painting-rinse-water-microplastics/
Trying out the golden crash system (though you can just buy buckets and elements yourself to do it cheaper) and it got some very good results.
Can’t we just inject ourselves with plastic eating bacteria or something?
We just need to turn up the UV lights voltage and melt the plastic out. Is that something we could look into?
We are the plastic eating bacteria.
If we knew of bacteria that cleanly ate plastic, we probably wouldn’t be riddled with micro plastics 😉
We know of them and are working on making them more efficient
Those are Ideonella, and the byproducts are still toxic tu humans. Wouldn’t work.
So what does it do? Cancer?
It’s making men infertile. theres even a shortage of viable sperm today around the world
Ok, that’s one positive at least.
In regards to humans, progress is being made. In coming years, expect greater clarity about effects on our bodies such as:
- inflammation
- oxidative stress (an imbalance of free radicals and antioxidants that damages cells)
- immune responses
- genotoxicity – damage to the genetic information in a cell that causes mutations, which can lead to cancer.
TL;DR yes, cancer. It also fucks with wildlife (blocking intestines, giving off poison)
Good chance it probably is, possibly increase chance for asthma, chance for heart attack, another is it probably makes us infertile probably a good thing depending how you think of it.
Is this stuff you know or are you guessing?
Mostly guess though I think remember reading some of it. Here are the links if your interested.
4.1 Fertility effects in adult males
Microplastics Linked to Heart Attack, Stroke and Death
Detrimental effects of microplastic exposure on normal and asthmatic pulmonary physiology
Could Microplastics Be a Driver for Early Onset Colorectal Cancer?
Disclaimer not a doctor, just some random guy in the internet.
A race to see what will kill the most of us first. The plastic or anthropogenic climate change.
Don’t forget Antimicrobial resistance (AMR)!
Plastic will probably only make us infertile while climate change will kill us AND already stop us from reproducing (or do you feel a kid born today has a good perspective on it’s future?).
Don’t forget societal collapse due to low birthrates!
Don’t forget Nuclear War!
Studies have identified some of the main sources of microplastics as:
- plastic-coated fertilisers
- plastic film used as mulch in agriculture
WTF?
- plastics recycling.
Uuuuh…
Plastic was never meant to be recycled.
So, what you’re telling us is, they’ve been lying for decades?
Yup passing on the responsibility from the manufacturer to the consumer
- plastic film used as mulch in agriculture
Wtf. Where and why?!
It’s the black plastic bag material that people used to cover their soil and poke holes through for their crops.
I never thought it was called plastic mulch though.
It serves the same purpose as actual mulch, which is blocking out weeds
Yes, but mulch has the meaning of ground up wood, so I think most people would think it was ground up plastics.
If it was ground up plastic it would probably just get carried off by the wind.
Or plastic greenhouses
Like, everywhere?
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=plastic+film+used+as+mulch+in+agriculture
Well, not here and we are doing fine.
Have you seen the process used in plastic recycling? The plastic is literally triturated into tiny bits before being heated up for the next stages.
Yep
Plastic-coated fertilisers?
Rally?
WTF do we need plastic-coated fertilisers for?
Controlled Release Fertilizers (CRF) are coated with a tiny layer of polymer which allow to release nutrients in a very timely and targeted way to various crops (trees, flowers, some cash crops) and used in closed environments such as potting plants or greenhouses.
So it has its use. Guess we’ll need to find an alternative to using polymers now (among a ton of other work).
to grow plastic infused plants, of course
Now sit down and eat your plasti-corn. There are children in other countries that have to eat normal corn.
Or several trillion very small problems.
We’re all trillionaires! 🎉
DiamondPlastic Hands 🙌 Tothemoonoceanour bodies! 🚀Found the crab 🦀
Maybe global warming will melt all the microplastics into one big macroplastic and that problem will be 100% solved.
Do our testicles all melt together?
The UN’s Global Plastics Treaty is certainly a step in the right direction. I’m not sure what can actually be done about the problem, especially with how pervasive synthetic materials are throughout the world. And what is medicine supposed to do? Plastics revolutionized sanitation, particularly in the medical field. Very complicated issue to resolve.
There are certain industries, like medical, that would probably be one of the last, if ever, to do away with plastic, simply due to the upsides. The only option we have as a species is to create a truly biodegradable, non-toxic, easily obtainable and cheap to produce alternative.
Haha who am I kidding, we are fucked, plastic manufacturers go brrrrrrrrr.
Medical and electrical insulation. Two places where plastics are better than the alternatives.
a truly biodegradable, non-toxic, easily obtainable and cheap to produce alternative
The problem in using biodegradeable materials to build things is that it degrades. Do you really want your wiring insulation decaying?
Biggest sources:
- 7.6 Mt from macro plastics breaking down
- 1.3 Mt from paint
- 1.0 Mt from tyres
10-40 Mt released into environment/year, and increasing.
I’m kinda surprised that more comes from paint than tires.
You only think that way because the material for a tire is all in one place and easy to see.
Paint on the other hand is effectively invisible when we ‘inventory’ a space mentally.
So a tire in the middle of your living room seems like a lot of rubber but all the paint over every inch of the wall in the same room doesnt, even if the room is big enough for the paint to fill the volume of the tire.
Still both from automobile infrastructure. /c/fuckcars bleeding into every Lemmy…
I think it depends on measure, if im not mistaken, by weight arohnd 50% of microplastics are tire dust.
Also depends on where you’re measuring. They make up a ton of the plastics in stormwater runoff for example. Sometimes up to 95% from what I found. And that stormwater often ends up in our drinking water.
Over 80% of microolastic production coming from macro plastic breakdown feels pretty bleak.
Plastics industry: “See?! We told you plastic decomposes and doesn’t just stay in landfills forever. Happy now?”
I am not happy now.
The article was very well written. Unfortunately, 90% of the people I’d forward it to would be TLDR…
The 7000 papers were really well written. Unfortunately, 90% of the people I’d forward them to would be article…
