microplastics

Research shows humans might inhale about 16.2 bits of microplastic every hour, which is equivalent to a credit card over an entire week. And these microplastics -- tiny debris in the environment generated from the degradation of plastic…

Cara Murez TUESDAY, May 30, 2023 (HealthDay News) -- Microplastic pollution is altering the gut microbiomes of wild seabirds and that could be a warning sign for humans, researchers…

Scientists have been worried about the potential harms of microplastics for years. These small plastic particles less than 5 mm in length have been found everywhere because of plastic pollution -- from the Earth's deep oceans to remote…

The plastics industry has long hyped recycling, even though it is well aware that it’s been a failure. Worldwide, only 9 percent of plastic waste actually gets recycled. In the United States, the rate is now 5 percent. Most used plastic is…

The smaller a particle is, the more organisms it can get into. Plastics can break down so small that they enter individual cells of either the algae or the zooplankton that feed on them. The researchers can’t yet say if all that…

The device developed by researchers from Japan has four serial trifurcated junctions where a 500 kHz acoustic wave is applied for a 105-fold enrichment of…

If you throw a polyester sweatshirt in the washing machine, it doesn’t emerge as quite its former self. All that agitation breaks loose plastic microfibers, which your machine flushes to a wastewater treatment facility. Any particles that…

Some 74 metric tons of microplastics dropped out of the atmosphere onto the New Zealand city of Auckland in 2020, according to a study published this week in Environmental Science & Technology — the equivalent of 3 million plastic…

Vortex generation by multiple swimming robots. The diameter of the multiple robots is 460 µm. Credit: S. Won, et al., Nature Communications, 13, 6750 (2022)…

Teflon, the brand name for PolyTetraFluoroEthylene (or PTFE), which is used to make nonstick pans, is generally stable and non-toxic below about 260 degrees centigrade, says Professor Oliver Jones, the associate dean of the Biosciences and…