I’ve now seen a handful of posts essentially calling out the Locked Tomb fandom for the clown car Alectohype business last week: “Artists don’t owe you books. Three years isn’t that long. Don’t pressure her.”
The thing is, Tamsyn Muir is not on here, and thus is not subject to whatever mass hysteria we might be having. If someone goes out of their way to tell her, that’s on them!
In the several years of waiting for Alecto I’ve been on here, I don’t think I’ve once seen a fan express anger, entitlement, or rudeness about the delay in the book. No one is sending hate mail. No one is showing up to her house. When given the opportunity to ask questions post-Nona, fans have been extremely polite. I routinely, routinely see “I hope she takes all the time she needs” posts. If people cross the line, like the fan who asked GRR Martin who was going to finish the book when he died, I would be the first to condemn that behavior.
By all means, get out of Tor’s mentions, but, ultimately, this is a fan space. We’re allowed to have fannish feelings like excitement and disappointment and express them here. If you don’t want to hear us rattling the bars of the enclosure, don’t come to the zoo!!
I can’t speak for other social media webbed sites but I really enjoy how tumblr seems to just completely spin a wheel on whatever media is hot right now. Like yeah sometimes it’s a new show that’s big and actively coming out but also sometimes there will be a solid month where half my dash is Columbo memes. Defy authority. Get really into an book from the 1800s. Watch shows that haven’t aired in 40 years. Celebrate the anniversary of the Boston Molasses Flood. Become unmarketable
One of the team behind the letter was blunt. “The brain microplastic paper is a joke,” said Dr Dušan Materić, at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Germany. “Fat is known to make false-positives for polyethylene. The brain has [approximately] 60% fat.” Materić and his colleagues suggested rising obesity levels could be an alternative explanation for the trend reported in the study.
Materić said: “That paper is really bad, and it is very explainable why it is wrong.” He thinks there are serious doubts over “more than half of the very high impact papers” reporting microplastics in biological tissue.
Another study reported MNPs in human testes, “highlighting the pervasive presence of microplastics in the male reproductive system”. But other scientists took a different view: “It is our opinion that the analytical approach used is not robust enough to support these claims.”
The doubts amount to a “bombshell”, according to Roger Kuhlman, a chemist formerly at the Dow Chemical Company. “This is really forcing us to re-evaluate everything we think we know about microplastics in the body. Which, it turns out, is really not very much. Many researchers are making extraordinary claims, but not providing even ordinary evidence.”
While analytical chemistry has long-established guidelines on how to accurately analyse samples, these do not yet exist specifically for MNPs, said Dr Frederic Béen, at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam: “But we still see quite a lot of papers where very standard good laboratory practices that should be followed have not necessarily been followed.”
A key way of measuring the mass of MNPs in a sample is, perhaps counterintuitively, vaporising it, then capturing the fumes. But this method, dubbed Py-GC-MS, has come under particular criticism. “[It] is not currently a suitable technique for identifying polyethylene or PVC due to persistent interferences,” concluded a January 2025 study led by Dr Cassandra Rauert, an environmental chemist at the University of Queensland in Australia.
“I do think it is a problem in the entire field,” Rauert told the Guardian. “I think a lot of the concentrations [of MNPs] that are being reported are completely unrealistic.”
“This isn’t a dig at [other scientists],” she added. “They use these techniques because we haven’t got anything better available to us. But a lot of studies that we’ve seen coming out use the technique without really fully understanding the data that it’s giving you.” She said the failure to employ normal quality control checks was “a bit crazy”.
Py-GC-MS begins by pyrolysing the sample – heating it until it vaporises. The fumes are then passed through the tubes of a gas chromatograph, which separates smaller molecules from large ones. Last, a mass spectrometer uses the weights of different molecules to identify them.
The problem is that some small molecules in the fumes derived from polyethylene and PVC can also be produced from fats in human tissue. Human samples are “digested” with chemicals to remove tissue before analysis, but if some remains the result can be false positives for MNPs. Rauert’s paper lists 18 studies that did not include consideration of the risk of such false positives. Rauert also argues that studies reporting high levels of MNPs in organs are simply hard to believe: “I have not seen evidence that particles between 3 and 30 micrometres can cross into the blood stream,” she said. “From what we know about actual exposure in our everyday lives, it is not biologically plausible that that mass of plastic would actually end up in these organs.”
“It’s really the nano-size plastic particles that can cross biological barriers and that we are expecting inside humans,” she said. “But the current instruments we have cannot detect nano-size particles.”
Whoopsie it was all bad science rushed out the door.
