On the one hand, hundreds or perhaps thousands of studies might be wrong. On the other hand, this one might be wrong. Who's to say?

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estearum 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Not even that! This study doesn't even say contamination is causing overestimation. It says that it's possible.

But as mentioned elsewhere in the thread, everyone knows that it's possible and take measure to mitigate it.

A paper that said those mitigations were insufficient or empirically found not to work would be interesting. A paper saying "you should mitigate this" is... not very interesting.

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xienze 8 hours ago | parent [-]

> Not even that! This study doesn't even say contamination is causing overestimation. It says that it's possible.

From the article:

> They found that on average, the gloves imparted about 2,000 false positives per millimeter squared area.

I dunno, that seems like a lot of false positives. Doesn’t that strongly imply that overestimation would be a pretty likely outcome here? Sounds like a completely sterile 1mm^2 area would raise a ton of false positives because of just the gloves.

	▲	estearum 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The way you mitigate this is by using negative samples. Basically blank swabs/tubes/whatever that don't have the substance you're testing in it, but that is handled the same way. Then the tested result is Actual Sample Result - Negative Sample Result. So you'd expect a microplastic sample to have 2,000 plus N per mm^2, and N is the result of your test.

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throwup238 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That has happened many times in scientific research. The aforementioned fad in DNA sequencing was one such case where tons of papers before proper methods were developed are entirely useless, essentially just garbage data. Another case is fMRI studies before the dead salmon experiment.