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Observer
08-04-2025
- Health
- Observer
What are microplastics doing to our bodies?
In a basement laboratory at the University of New Mexico, Marcus Garcia rummaged through a bin full of plastic waste. He picked past bottles, chunks of fishing net, a toothbrush, a cup with a Pokémon character, and a G.I. Joe. 'Yes!' he exclaimed, holding up a discarded pipette tip. 'Found it.' Garcia, a postdoctoral fellow in pharmaceutical sciences, discovered the pipette tip last summer with colleagues on a remote Hawaii beach. It was miraculously intact, though it had most likely been degraded for years by the sun, ozone, and the ocean. How poignant, he thought. It was an object he and thousands of other scientists used every day. And there it was, washed up on a beach along with hundreds of pounds of other plastic waste they were now cleaning up and collecting for research. Garcia is part of a leading lab, run by toxicologist Matthew Campen, that is studying how tiny particles known as microplastics accumulate in our bodies. The researchers' most recent paper, published in February in Nature Medicine, generated a string of alarmed headlines and buzz in the scientific community: They found that human brain samples from 2024 had nearly 50% more microplastics than brain samples from 2016. 'This stuff is increasing in our world exponentially,' Campen said. As it piles up in the environment, it is piling up in us, too. Some of the researchers' other findings have also prompted widespread concern. In the study, the brains of people with dementia had far more microplastics than the brains of people without it. In papers last year, the researchers showed that microplastics were present in human testes and placentas. Other scientists have also documented them in blood, semen, breast milk and even a baby's first stool. Also in February, along with colleagues from Baylor College of Medicine and Texas Children's Hospital, Campen's lab released preliminary research showing that the placentas of babies who were delivered preterm contained more microplastics than those of babies delivered at full term, despite having had less time for those particles to accumulate. But for all the places they found microplastics, and all the concern about health risks, there was so much that the researchers still did not understand. The first thing toxicologists learn is that 'the dose makes the poison': Any substance, even water, can be poisonous at a high enough dose. But Campen and Garcia had no idea what amount of microplastics it took to start causing health problems. And with so many plastics in our world, was it our food, our clothes, our air or other sources entirely that posed the greatest threat? To start answering these questions, they turned to dead bodies. Hunting for Plastics Down the hall from Garcia's search, a cabinet in the team's main laboratory held samples from brains, livers, kidneys, arteries, and sex organs. Garcia opened a jar labeled 'DB' — for 'dementia brains' — that released a smell familiar to anyone who's spent time in an anatomy lab: formaldehyde. Using tweezers, he plucked out a piece of brain tissue and placed it on a glass petri dish. It resembled a piece of tofu, with thick gray matter surrounding a narrow band of white. In their paper, the researchers reported the median concentration of microplastics in 24 human brains from 2024 was nearly 5,000 micrograms per gram, though there is a fair amount of uncertainty in that estimate because of the methods used to calculate it. That's about 7 grams of plastic per brain — as much as makes up a disposable spoon, Campen said, or about five water bottle caps. The brains of people with dementia had more, though the researchers noted that might be because those brains have a more porous blood-brain barrier and are less able to clear toxic particles. It's not yet clear what effect this amount of plastic has on human health, but it's enough to cause alarm. 'I don't think I've talked to a single person who's said: 'Fantastic! Love to know that there's all that plastic in my brain,'' Campen quipped. His group is now studying tissue from cross sections of a single brain to find out whether certain regions have higher microplastics concentrations and whether that could be linked to issues like Parkinson's or memory loss. Ideally, for comparison, he would like to study a brain from before the 1970s or 1960s, when plastics became ubiquitous. 'You can imagine the classic old museum with a brain floating in a jar,' he said. 'I really need one of those.' The experiments are costly and time-consuming. Brain samples aren't easy to come by. The machines that analyze the plastics are about $150,000 a pop. (Next to the oldest one, a research assistant had placed a candle with a picture of Jesus and the words 'I trust in you,' in hopes of keeping the machine running smoothly. Of course, they don't light it.) But these studies have made it possible for Campen to draw certain conclusions that nobody else has. They led him to believe that the microplastics in our bodies are much smaller than anything other scientists had described, which would explain how they get past our bodies' barriers and into our organs. He confirmed that suspicion using a high-resolution microscope: It showed shard-like fragments no more than 200 nanometers long — about 400 times less than the width of a hair — and so thin they were translucent. Earlier studies had largely used microscopes that could see down only to 25 times that size. To Campen, documenting particles so small could upend our understanding of how much plastic is in us, how it gets there, where it could go, and what damage it might do. Going Back Decades Researchers can't say for certain how these plastics are getting into our bodies or where they originated, but they have some clues. They know that plastic waste ends up in our soil, water, air, and even rain, said Christy Tyler, a professor of environmental science at the Rochester Institute of Technology who studies microplastics in aquatic ecosystems. It may be incorporated into plants and concentrated as it moves up the food chain. Plastic is in our clothes, our rugs, our couches, and our food storage containers — 'really, it's everywhere,' Tyler said. The characteristics of the plastics Campen's team found in human tissue suggest they came primarily from waste that was produced many years ago and was weathered over time. The researchers found a significant amount of polyethylene, for example, the dominant type of plastic produced in the 1960s, but less of the plastic used in water bottles, which took off in the 1990s. Because plastic production has doubled every 10 to 15 years, even if we were to stop making it today, so much plastic is already in use that more and more plastic waste would accumulate in the environment and, potentially, in our bodies for decades to come. Campen suspects the main way these plastics get inside our bodies is when we ingest them, long after they've been discarded and started to break down. He is less concerned about so-called fresh plastics, like those that slough off cutting boards and water bottles as we are using them, because those particles are much larger and newer than what he has measured. And research suggests that the body clears out some larger microplastics. Campen acknowledged that his view on fresh plastics was 'unconventional,' and other scientists say it's worth taking steps to reduce your exposure. Microplastics can leach out of water bottles, microwaved food containers, and synthetic clothing, and research from animal studies suggests these particles could be harmful, said Tracey Woodruff, director of the program on reproductive health and the environment at the University of California, San Francisco. 'Maybe more of it is coming from this degraded microplastic, but that doesn't mean you're not getting exposed from these other, fresher microplastics,' Woodruff said. Larger particles can still affect the gut, which might then affect the rest of the body, Campen said. Additionally, scientists believe that certain chemicals in plastics, like phthalates, bisphenol A, and flame retardants, can harm human health. 'There are many years of study on these plastics to be done,' Woodruff said. 'But we still have plenty of science to be like, 'Wow, I know I don't want to be exposed to any more plastics.'' Tyler said the University of New Mexico lab had done the best work possible for such a nascent field. 'Matt's group is at the very cutting edge,' she said. But, as with any early science, there are caveats. For one, these tiny particles are extremely difficult to measure. And nobody has yet repeated the research to see if the results hold up. The big question is whether everything they're measuring is plastic — or if some of it is lipids, which can look similar chemically but occur naturally in the body. 'The estimates they have for how much is in the brain seem high,' Woodruff said. But even if they are, she said, 'that wouldn't negate the findings that they're seeing more plastics over time. And that is very consistent with what we know about the production of plastic.' Getting a Handle on the Health Risks There's one question Campen and Garcia feel they have started to answer with some confidence. That's the one they began with: How much plastic is in our bodies? Now they are ready to explore possible links between certain doses and human health outcomes, such as heart disease, fertility issues, and multiple sclerosis. And they are starting an experiment in animals to understand what doses might be harmful. Teya Garland, a pharmacy student, was beginning that process in the lab. Wearing a mask to avoid inhaling particles, she inserted bits of what looked like colored chalk into a machine that howled eerily as it froze and pulverized the plastics. Eventually, researchers will feed them to mice and study how different levels and types affect their brains and behavior. The pieces had come from the beach in Hawaii, where Garcia and others collected 1,800 pounds of plastic debris and 500 pounds of netting. Volunteers there clear about that amount every few weeks. 'It's one thing to see a picture,' Garcia said, looking at a video he shot on his phone. 'To see it when we were there, it just opens your eyes,' he added. Every imaginable use for plastic — takeout containers, bleach bottles, cigarettes, plastic bags, and even lab equipment — seemed to be represented on that beach and in the ocean that stretched beyond it. And every day, it was breaking down, getting smaller and smaller. One day, some of it could end up in us. This article originally appeared in
Yahoo
15-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Netflix's Most Expensive Movie Ever Is Here, and It's a Monumental Disaster
When he got his first glimpse of a movie studio, Orson Welles excitedly proclaimed it 'the biggest electric train set any boy ever had.' But with a reported budget of more than $300 million, Joe and Anthony Russo's The Electric State makes Welles' train set look like a busted caboose. The most expensive movie in Netflix's history, it's also among the costliest of all time, joining a list that includes the brothers' own Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame. If the Russos are the most profligate creators in history—their Amazon series Citadel is also one of the most expensive TV shows ever made—they're among the most successful too. Endgame and Infinity War grossed nearly $5 billion in movie theaters alone. And yet for all the money they're making, and all that they're allowed to spend, they don't seem to be enjoying themselves very much. The Electric State certainly wants you to think you're having a good time. Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, who, with the exception of the typographically doomed Cherry, have written all of the Russos' movies since 2014's Captain America: The Winter Soldier, populate their world—an alternate mid-1990s in which labor-saving robots have been a fact of life for nearly four decades—with a range of quirky machines, from animatronic popcorn buckets to a chatty barbershop chair that keeps pestering Chris Pratt's shaggy metalhead to submit to a haircut. Although the story is set mostly in the aftermath of a war between humanity and robots that cost countless lives, the tone is consistently, even aggressively, chipper. (Humans themselves generally stay at home, puppeteering mechanized exoskeletons they can manipulate from afar through a primitive version of the internet.) Every character speaks in the same quippy, sarcastic patter, and their jokes are double-underlined, first by another character's shocked response, then by the original speaker's smug Yeah, I said that smirk. A common complaint with modern megabudget movies is that it's impossible to tell where the money went. Watching the Russos' nondescript Netflix action thriller The Gray Man, for example, it's easy to look at its washed-out colors and uninspired set pieces and think, $200 million for that? The Electric State at least looks expensive. Much of the story takes place in the Ex, an arid chunk of the American Southwest that has been turned into a reservation for the defeated robot survivors, where hundreds of intricately designed and meticulously realized sentient devices have gathered in an abandoned shopping mall. There are massive battles in which cars collide with skyscrapers several stories up, and belowground there's a cavernous lair filled with black-market memorabilia. (In the post-conflict '90s, G.I. Joe lunch boxes have suddenly become valuable contraband.) And yet the movie suffers from a constant lack, not of resources but of imagination, of inspiration—of, to put it simply, fun. There are plenty of things in The Electric State that ought to be fun, like the revelation that the robot uprising's leader was a familiar commercial mascot, a human-sized legume with a top hat and monocle. But when we're informed that 'Mr. Peanut signed the treaty of surrender with President Clinton,' there's no wink at the underlying absurdity, just a flat recitation of fact. In the movie's reality, self-governing robots were first realized by Walt Disney in 1955 as a theme-park attraction, and they retain an element of midcentury kitsch, but we never get a chance to linger on the darkly humorous implication that untold thousands of human soldiers must have met death at the hands of an ambulatory doughnut or homicidal pay phone. The story cries out for some of Paul Verhoeven's consumerist satire, but instead the Russos have chosen to play it as Spielberg—or, more specifically, like the cut-rate Spielberg imitations that clogged multiplexes in the 1980s after E.T.'s runaway success had the studios scrambling to keep up. Its villains, a monomaniac tech mogul (Stanley Tucci) and a bloodthirsty general (Giancarlo Esposito), are like a child's imagined version of what their parents do at work, inhabiting vacant, generic spaces that tell us nothing about who they are or what they represent. For most of The Electric State, we're stuck following Michelle (Millie Bobby Brown), a rebellious teenage foster kid who lost her entire family in a car crash just before the war. For reasons Markus and McFeely's script can't be bothered to explain, Michelle becomes convinced that her younger brother somehow survived the accident and is remotely controlling the movements of a robot named Cosmo, a grinning, metallic humanoid with a Bob's Big Boy pompadour, who clanks his way into her backyard one night. This ought to entail a massive leap of faith, one made even more daunting by the fact that Cosmo speaks only in catchphrases gleaned from a children's TV show. But the Russos don't seem to care about a young girl wrestling with the idea that the brother she's mourned for years might still be alive, so they simply skip past the emotional deadweight and move on to the next eye-catching spectacle. The beats of a Russo brothers movie are so predetermined they don't bear lingering on, but The Electric State might be the first time they've opted to just skip over them altogether. For as much as it owes to the Spielberg movies of the '80s, The Electric State is most directly indebted to Ready Player One, which likewise takes place in a world built of pop-cultural discards and conglomerated intellectual property. But as much film-geek fun as Spielberg had rummaging through the Warner Bros. vault, he at least realized he was creating a dystopia. The Russos don't see anything viscerally wrong with a world built entirely out of other people's creations, because that's how they make movies, bringing nothing of their own but a saw and a bucket of glue. (There's nothing wrong with pastiche, but you still have to contribute something original.) It doesn't occur to them that giving the defeated robot army's military commander a courtly Southern drawl (courtesy of Matthew McConaughey) evokes Confederate nostalgia, any more than they can process the contradiction in putting Captain America at the heart of a '70s-style paranoid thriller, because they're just stripping the past for parts. As the music swells at the climax of The Electric State, you start to notice a familiar melody creeping into the underscore, and then you realize: It's just 'Wonderwall.' Why write your own tune when you can buy one from Oasis? The Russos are pushing the boundaries of the film industry's economics, if nothing else. But they're branch managers at heart, at their peak when they're enthusiastically carrying out directives from the head office. Their Marvel movies draw on decades' worth of comic-book storylines, dreamed up by people whose names are saved for the end-credits crawl, and they put just enough spin on familiar conventions to make audiences feel as if they're seeing them anew (although, in truth, it's their inevitability that makes them feel satisfying). But when they have to make something of their own, for a company that now seems content to simply copy whatever's already popular, it's almost awe-inspiring how little they come up with. They've got the coolest toys imaginable, and all they can think to do is follow the instructions.
Bloomberg
20-02-2025
- Business
- Bloomberg
Hasbro Sees Return to Growth and $1 Billion in Savings by 2027
Hasbro Inc. is targeting mid-single-digit sales growth through 2027 and savings of about $1 billion, as the toymaker laid out a plan to expand its reach over the next few years. The maker of G.I. Joe figurines and Dungeons & Dragons board games will allocate more investment to brands and categories with the highest potential to generate revenue and profit growth, such as Play-Doh, Magic: The Gathering, emerging markets and its self-published video games, the company said in a statement Thursday.
