Jesse Rogerson

And all the people who are trying to get a hand, all the scientists and engineers who are trying to get a handle on what's actually happening in the environment, how that makes it into us.

What are the pathways it gets into us?

What are the pathways it gets into the environment?

And eventually, what's the physiological effects?

All of these are still actively being studied.

And what this group found is that when you're measuring, there was a group measuring how much microplastics is in the atmosphere, in the air.

So when you sample, when you're sampling the air, how do you do that?

How do you actually build an experiment where you can sample the air without contaminating your sample?

This is what I think people forget about science is how much effort goes into the experiment before you actually do the work.

So they had to take into account like, what jars are you using?

What are the jars made of?

That's a simple one.

But they also were like, wait a minute, we need to think about what clothes we're wearing while we're doing the experiment.

Because if our clothes have microplastics in them, microplastics may shed from our clothes into our experiment.

The room you're doing it in, the ventilation of the room you're doing it in, what materials make up the walls and the desks and like all of this,

How do you actually account for all of these variables properly?

That's what they were identifying.

And they found they were still wildly, after accounting for all of these variables, they were overestimating the amount of microplastics compared to their counterparts.

And it was because of the gloves they were using.

The gloves they were using were contaminating their samples.