This is essentially creative botany for producing known biological chemicals in bulk via plants instead of transgenic yeast like would normally be used. These aren't the same scientists working on de novo drugs for the conditions you're talking about.

Hard to say, if you read the linked full paper there's 50% increases over 8 years in the samples, and you'd see older people accumulate more if the exposure had been linear for each cohort over time, which may not have been the case, either. They remain speculative if there's uncharacterized clearance mechanisms or equilibrium to exposure in the same paragraph.

The other confounding factor is that the microplastics build up over time, whereas something like a sublethal salt dose will make you feel bloated and thirsty for an afternoon until you have a good piss. The rate of bioaccumulation may vary.

It is the crux of how MAGA and MAHA are interacting. They'll make pronouncements about health while ensuring that regulatory agencies are incapable of doing anything but requesting voluntary action.

Because it is a lot more interesting than "baseline background on an assay needed adjusted up because of gloves" and also makes it easier to dismiss that the total load of microplastics in everything is slightly lower than we thought. Which is the sort of thing that happens regularly in any basic research and assay development without breathless news about it, because Limit of Background studies are even boring for the technicians running them.

Cult of Personality / Great Man type folks aren't usually right vs left, although they do have a tendency to approve of authoritarianism.

It'd also be a matter of degrees and likely vary by the types of microplastics one is exposed to (some kinds are better for some kinds of science than others for these reasons, as well. Sometimes you can get very different results if your samples were in polycarbonate vs polyethelene). Some are going to be more inert, just kinda gross physical pollution like sand in your gears. Others would likely affect hormone regulation. Others might just be a suitable substrate for biofilm and make you more susceptible to bacterial illness once your immune system declines.

If the effect is consistent then you're just moving the baseline up, it is like looking for protein and using buffers with protein in it like milk or FBS... you can do it just fine but you have to account for it in the math.

You can cancel out background if the effect can be determined to be uniform to your controls as well, depending on the assay

That was my thought, although from upthread the definition is so bad you might need to make some raspberry pi switches, too.

Mesh stuff like Google WiFi shoots for that sort of thing, it is pretty opaque to the user, with Apple style lack of configurability on nitty gritty stuff.

I piece of mail addressed to you was sufficient when I started voting

Yes, reading about how many people they killed I think the time to support a revolution has passed

Fossil derived oils and plastic do have a great many fantastic uses beyond burning them, yes. Much like the trees they came from do today.

You'd think so but man do I feel like Elrond "Our list of allies has grown thin" whenever resourcing upgrade projects comes up