microplastics
3 stories tagged "microplastics"
Infectious Disease
Weathered Plastic in the Water Grows Its Own City of Drug-Resistant Bacteria
On weathered plastic drifting from a lake into a river, researchers logged 102 new antibiotic-resistance gene subtypes moving into the surrounding water in five weeks.
Brain & AgingChemists Cracked Unsorted Plastic Into Hydrogen With Lye, and Trapped Three-Quarters of the Carbon Instead of Torching It
Most plastic never gets recycled. It gets burned or buried, and polyethylene keeps turning up in human brain tissue. A UCLA and Ewha team cracked mixed, unsorted trash into more than 90 percent pure hydrogen at low heat and trapped 75 percent of the carbon instead of letting it escape.
InvestigationsA Road Made From Recycled Fishing Nets Shed Less Microplastic Than the Tires Rolling Over It
Hawaii scientists laid ocean-net plastic into a real Oahu street, then measured what came off. The recycled plastic barely registered. Tire wear, the source almost nobody regulates, swamped it by orders of magnitude.