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Research Digests
The Atlas grows in bursts, not on a schedule. When a large group of papers comes in, we read it and write up what stood out.
Estimates of the plastic in a body turn on the largest particles
From the same tissue data, one analysis gets 159 milligrams of plastic in a body or 0.41, depending on how it treats the largest particles. Also: 49 labs counting one spiked beach sample, and where a swallowed dose went in hens.
Small particles take the blood, larger ones take the lymph
In mice, 100 nanometre beads peaked in the blood within an hour. Beads five and ten times larger took the lymph route and built up in the lymph nodes. Also: a cell test that scored the dose added, not the dose that arrived, and so understated the hazard.
The busier the road, the more plastic in the urine
In Bangkok, people living with heavier traffic breathed more plastic, carried more of it in their urine, and showed more oxidative damage. Also: a cell viability test that misreads beads, and particles that only did harm in company.
The damage arrived where the plastic did not
In sheep, dietary plastic damaged the testis without a particle ever reaching it, and a missing bacterial metabolite carried the injury instead. Also: a first look inside human ovarian follicular fluid, and a warning that some detections may not be real.
Different organs, one failing part of the cell
Human placental tissue and two studies of the kidney converge on mitochondrial damage, work on insulin producing cells finds a separate immune route with a matching signal in people exposed at work, and a review names the gap none of it has closed.
Smaller particles, in more of us, than thirty-three years ago
A pair of autopsy archives from one hospital gives the field its first real before and after, alongside new work on what crosses into a pregnancy and what that does not yet prove.
What the body does with the plastic it can't break down
Several of the strongest new studies describe a body that files microplastics away in the very cells meant to clear them, and the opening question of what that storage costs.
The particles we have not been counting
The findings that stood out, and why the one that matters most is that our instruments have probably been undercounting the smallest particles all along.
The brain is not as shielded as we thought
Micro and nanoplastics turning up in nearly every brain sample tested, new attention to the air we breathe, and the slow work of cleanup.
The waste is outrunning every fix for it
A large group of papers about solutions: degradation, recycling, and bioplastics. And one heavily cited study finding that even the most ambitious commitments do not keep up.
When the question turned from the ocean to us
For years this was a marine science. The most cited papers in the founding corpus, and the 2020 study that made the human body something the field had to examine.
Research digests by email
When a large batch of papers lands in the Atlas, we read through it and send a short write-up of what stood out.