Text is short and clear enough that it warrants a full read, but for those who visit the comments first:<p>> If you look at a piece of plastic through a powerful microscope, you'll see alternating layers of hard material and soft material. […]<p>> [The researchers] discovered that the process [of forming microplastics] begins in the soft layers, which grow weaker over time due to environmental degradation and can break off even when the plastic is not under stress. By themselves, these soft pieces break down quickly in the environment. Problems arise when the failure of a soft layer allows hard layers to break off.
The sooner we stop producing and consuming plastic in all its forms, the better for all life on Earth. There was life before plastic - it used wood, glass, metal, and natural fabric. It was not that long ago, certainly within my life.
I still wonder when we will see the emergence of evolutionary adapted life to this. Bacteria able to diggest plastic.
Mikrobial lifeforms using plastic as a sort of shield from detection ("think of a dissease") using mayflylarva like structures made of microplastics to shield from detection by white blood cells.
I also curious wether misfiring defense detection due to plastic residue is responsible for allergic reaction disease on the rise in recent years. It would start where the plastic arrives- in the colon.
The actual article is here: <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-58233-3" rel="nofollow">https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-58233-3</a><p><i>Since hitting the market 75 years ago, plastic has become ubiquitous -- and so, presumably, have nanoplastics</i><p>1950? Polyethylene and nylon appeared in the 1930s. Celluloid in the mid-1800s. We have been exposed to "nanoplastics" (including things like petroleum jelly and other hydrocarbon fractions) for more than a century, with very <i>very</i> little evidence it's "dangerous".