microplastic

Forbes said Baker's project will help develop a standardized way of collecting, isolating and quantifying microplastic particles to be used across the U.S.

U.S. News 2010

In Puget Sound, citizen scientists with the Port Townsend Marine Science Center have been sampling sediment from beaches for Baker's microplastic project, as well as their own study.

U.S. News 2010

Technol. 2008, 42, 5026-5031) confirmed that captive Mytilus edulis mussels fed microplastic fragments accumulated the plastic bits in their guts.

Organic Consumers Association News Headlines 2008

Technol. 2007, 41, 7759-7764) used modeling experiments to show that common marine lugworms can accumulate phenanthrene, a persistent anthropogenic compound commonly found in the ocean, when microplastic particles saturated with a small amount of the contaminant are added to the sediments where the worms dwell.

Organic Consumers Association News Headlines 2008

It’s distributed in microplastic form across the water column,” he says.

Microplastics could be hampering the ocean’s ability to capture carbon James Dinneen 2025

That includes the Mariana trench, where more than 13,000 microplastic particles per cubic metre were measured nearly 7 kilometres down.

Microplastics could be hampering the ocean’s ability to capture carbon James Dinneen 2025

Mincer and his colleagues have reviewed microplastic measurements taken over the past decade from nearly 2000 sites around the world.

Microplastics could be hampering the ocean’s ability to capture carbon James Dinneen 2025

These so-called microplastic fragments are everywhere, from Arctic snow to the Amazon rainforest.

What are microplastics doing to your brain? We’re starting to find out Marta Zaraska 2025

“If you turn the top of your plastic bottle, you shower tiny pieces of plastic down into the water,” says Tamara Galloway, an ecotoxicologist at the University of Exeter, UK, whose work focuses on the environmental and health effects of pollultants like microplastics.

What are microplastics doing to your brain? We’re starting to find out Marta Zaraska 2025

In 2010, Katharina Ribbeck at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and her colleagues measured how quickly microplastic beads with varying electrostatic charges moved through pig mucus.

Discovering the marvels of mucus is inspiring amazing new medicines Grace Wade 2025

The problem is that some of the studies only measured the number of microplastic particles in a sample and others measured the mass of microplastics.

How worried should you be about microplastics? Chelsea Whyte 2026

For example, they estimated the mass of microplastic particles found in drinking water using measurements from ocean water and particle counts per litre from drinking water.

How worried should you be about microplastics? Chelsea Whyte 2026

But microplastics in the ocean and our drinking water aren’t necessarily the same – if the average size of a microplastic particle in the ocean is much larger than those in filtered drinking water, the ultimate calculation will be inflated.

How worried should you be about microplastics? Chelsea Whyte 2026

In fact, in 2022 the World Health Organization warned in a report that most animal studies use concentrations of microplastics much higher than people are typically exposed to, or use larger microplastic particles than are likely to be taken up by the human body.

How worried should you be about microplastics? Chelsea Whyte 2026