Adam Rochussen

Hilarious. Fig. 8 from this @SciReports paper is just a screenshot of someone's desktop. Such low effort you almost admire it.

Btw, Pakistan and China (where the authors are from) have the 4th & 5th highest retraction rates in the world.

Peer review is fundamentally unserious.

I took GCSE Latin when I was 14 (a year early + I’m young for my year). But I was ready to sit the exam two years earlier, when I was 12, because the academic scholarship entrance exam to my secondary school was far harder than GCSE Latin. All of the other scholarship boys were the same.

Though we spent 2 years dossing around, getting worse at Latin, and watching the movie Troy a lot, I’m glad we were eventually able to sit the Latin GCSE exams early. It meant we could then learn Ancient Greek too and sit that GCSE the following year.

The same applied to modern languages. Many of us sat French a year early and then learned Italian GCSE in one year. This was fun! We also did maths a year early and could then spread the load of the double maths A levels over three years instead of two.

If we weren’t able to sit GCSEs early, school would have been substantially more boring and my classmates and I would all be much less educated. In what world is this a desirable outcome?

At least Powell isn’t implementing a complete ban on early GCSEs (for now…). But she’s also making the curriculum way easier across the board at the same time. There’s just going to be an even bigger proportion of smart young kids who completely check out of school because it’s so dumbed down and uninteresting.

@gtmom @tracewoodgrains can you guys start proselytising across the pond please 😂

I won $500 for having a weapons-grade British accent. Pretty nice.

When people think of "cognitive decline", they typically think of Joe Biden doing a Roomba impression on stage. But cognitive decline begins way earlier than most realise.

Part of the problem, though, is that people can't seem to agree when this happens. Age 20 is probably a bit of an exaggeration (likely a consequence of the study design more than anything else), but it's not far off!

I decided to do a bit of a deep dive trying to answer the question "at what age do we start to get stupider?" 🧵:

I don't buy it. The paper that WaPo is reporting on is a chemistry paper. All they show is that plastic, because it is hydrophobic, can produce hydroxyl radicals in a solution. Big deal.

There are no data in cells. Cells have a bunch of hydrophobic surfaces and produce a bunch of their own free radicals—and have sophisticated protective antioxidant mechanisms. How much plastic is expected to be inside a cell? Does this create •OH at a rate that is even noticeable in the context of a living cell? Nobody knows.

Their only biological data are these two figure panels. The scale bar-less micrographs are supposed to show a plastic particle destroying red blood cells. Huh?!

They use absorbance of light at 405 nm is a proxy for haemolysis (because free haemoglobin absorbs at this wavelength), but there is no positive control here (we have no idea what "a lot of haemolysis" is supposed to look like).

To get the degree of haemolysis that they see, they add 2 mg of plastic to 150 μL of mouse red blood cell suspension. That's 13.3 mg/mL, or around 3000 times higher than what has been detected in actual human blood (ignoring the fact that those human measurements were probably exaggerated by lab contamination).

Their haemolysis data also directly contradicts that of the only other study they cite, which found zero haemolysis from PE particles in the same size range.

I avoid plastics because I don't like the way cheap synthetic materials feel and behave. But plastics are obviously an insanely good thing for humanity and microplastic doomerism based on shitty studies purporting to show health risks is just annoying at this point.