{"id":702902,"date":"2026-04-03T22:04:14","date_gmt":"2026-04-03T22:04:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/702902\/"},"modified":"2026-04-03T22:04:14","modified_gmt":"2026-04-03T22:04:14","slug":"an-embarrassing-mistake-may-have-skewed-microplastics-research-all-along","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/702902\/","title":{"rendered":"An Embarrassing Mistake May Have Skewed Microplastics Research All Along"},"content":{"rendered":"

Earth\u2019s worrying pall of microplastics<\/a>\u2014recorded by scientists practically everywhere, across our planet\u2019s oceans<\/a>, aloft in clouds above Mount Fuji<\/a>, burrowed into human brains<\/a>, and even in the testicles of our poor damn dogs<\/a>\u2014might be modestly less apocalyptic than previously thought.<\/p>\n

Researchers at the University of Michigan (U-M) have identified a surprising and arguably mildly embarrassing error that might be contributing to dramatic overestimates of microplastics content across multiple studies: flecks of debris shed by the standard latex and nitrile gloves that scientists typically use in the lab. Tiny soap-like salts, called stearates, coat these gloves as remnants of the manufacturing process, according to the new U-M study, where they can rub off, creating thousands of false positives per square millimeter (or about one-thousandth of a square inch).<\/p>\n

The U-M team replicated a common test surface for microplastics work to evaluate how seven different types of disposable lab gloves could muddy the final microplastics count in each case.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe type of contact we tried to mimic touches upon all varieties of microplastics research,\u201d according to a statement<\/a> from the study\u2019s lead author Madeline Clough, a recent doctoral graduate at U-M.\u00a0\u201cIf you are contacting a sample with a gloved hand,\u201d Clough said, \u201cyou\u2019re likely imparting these stearates that could overestimate your results.\u201d<\/p>\n

A trick of the light <\/p>\n

Obviously, a stearate salt is not a plastic. But the microscale geometry of these salts looks similar to polyethylene, one of the most common forms of plastic found polluting our environment at the microplastic scale. (Clough\u2019s study went with the definition of microplastic as a particle between one and 5,000 micrometers, i.e. between very small and about 0.2 inches.)<\/p>\n

Stearate\u2019s physical resemblance to polyethylene at these sizes has proven to be close enough to fool the infrared light-based techniques used to scan samples of microplastic particulates.<\/p>\n

\u201cResearchers use vibrational spectroscopy to identify microplastics,\u201d Clough explained<\/a> in an essay for The Conversation, with her study coauthor Anne McNeil, \u201cwhich entails measuring how the particle interacts with light to produce what scientists call a chemical fingerprint.\u201d<\/p>\n

Vibrational spectroscopy utilizes nondestructive interactions between the energy and photons in a beam of infrared light, an effect called \u201cRaman scattering,\u201d to provoke and measure distinct vibrations, rotations, and other movements by the molecules a given researcher is hoping to identify. It can be subtle work. Sometimes<\/a>, science is more art than science. (A lot of people don\u2019t get that.)<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s why we need chemists and people who understand chemical structure to be working in this field,\u201d McNeil, a professor of chemistry, macromolecular science, and engineering at U-M, noted in the university\u2019s statement.<\/p>\n

\"GlovesAbove, micrometer-scale imaging shows how visually similar stearate salts shed by many lab gloves (top) appear to look to some microplastics (bottom). Credit: Madeline Clough, University of Michigan If the glove sheds, you must retread <\/p>\n

The researchers rigorously crafted an identical set of aluminum-coated silicon surfaces and brought them each into contact with three professional-grade types of latex gloves, three nitrile gloves of similar quality, and one ultra-high-purity nitrile glove used in circuit-manufacturing cleanrooms.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe hypothesized that the strict contaminant-free standards of cleanrooms would necessitate particulate-free gloves,\u201d the team explained<\/a> in their study, published last month in the Royal Society of Chemistry journal RSC Analytical Methods. True to form, they reported, the cleanroom gloves produced \u201cfewer false positives per unit area than other glove varieties.\u201d<\/p>\n

Latex gloves proved to be markedly worse than the nitrile gloves, overall, with one of those three tests producing roughly 7,000 \u201cfalse positive\u201d stearate particles per square millimeter. The three lab-standard nitrile gloves tended to produce false positives in the low thousands per sq-mm. The cleanroom gloves, by contrast, produced at worst a few hundred per sq-mm.<\/p>\n

Crucially, however, the researchers do not believe their findings minimize the reality of microplastics pollution as a very real global problem: \u201cWe may be overestimating microplastics,\u201d McNeil noted, \u201cbut there should be none.\u201d<\/p>\n

In addition to recommending cleanroom gloves for future microplastics research, or when possible no gloves at all, Clough and McNeil also noted in The Conversation that they had \u201cdeveloped methods to help differentiate the chemical fingerprints\u201d of stearate salts. The team has been refining and publishing<\/a> on this technique, a machine-learning statistical analysis on the Raman-scattering data called conformal prediction, since at least 2024.<\/p>\n

Their goal, as they wrote in the new paper, is to help themselves and other microplastics researchers \u201crecover older, potentially contaminated datasets.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe plan to continue our research on Michigan\u2019s atmospheric microplastic contamination,\u201d Clough and McNeil wrote, \u201cthis time without gloves.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Earth\u2019s worrying pall of microplastics\u2014recorded by scientists practically everywhere, across our planet\u2019s oceans, aloft in clouds above Mount…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":702903,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[8],"tags":[8288,3439,159,293473,67,132,68],"class_list":["post-702902","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-microplastics","tag-plastic-pollution","tag-science","tag-scientific-method","tag-united-states","tag-unitedstates","tag-us"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116343044010251063","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/702902","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=702902"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/702902\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/702903"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=702902"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=702902"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=702902"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}