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A flask of orange dye, a spoonful of plastic powder, water, and a stirrer turning in the dark. After 10 days the orange was nearly gone. Nothing in that flask was supposed to be able to do that: the…
Six common plastics are not chemically inert once they sit in water as small particles, chemists at Columbia University and the University of California, Berkeley report. In a paper published Oct.…
Researchers in Germany have released an open-source tool that estimates how much microplastic lies buried in estuary sediment at places nobody has sampled. The tool, called NIXVEGS, predicts particle…
Plastic shows up in Arctic snow, Arctic air, Arctic seawater and Arctic fish, and the explanation usually offered is distance. Particles ride winds and currents north from the places where plastic is…
Researchers at the Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research (TNO) report that a microplastic toxicity test understates the hazard by about a factor of two when it counts the dose…
Jay R. Rooker of Texas A&M University and colleagues have measured plastic particles in the muscle of dolphinfish and yellowfin tuna caught across the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans. Muscle is…
A drone carrying a cyclone air sampler collected microplastics 80 to 100 meters above the ground at two sites in Colorado, researchers reported Oct. 6, 2026, in Scientific Reports. The authors…
Every day, we encounter the electrostatic properties of plastics, often without giving them much thought. Synthetic fabrics cling to one another, dust is readily drawn to plastic surfaces, and in…
Order a microplastic from a catalog and a sphere arrives. It is smooth, round and the same material all the way around. It is also nothing like the thing it stands in for. Plastic in the world is not…
In March 2024, the German research vessel Maria S. Merian held station over deep water south of Gran Canaria and began lowering sample bottles. The deepest one closed at 2,720 meters, in water that…
Chemists at the University of Almería have published a laboratory method for separating microplastic particles as small as 0.05 millimeter from agricultural soil and used it to measure the soils…
Six small shoreline crustaceans of about the same size and diet, collected along the same stretch of central Mediterranean coast, carried very different amounts of plastic, and the spread tracked…