A new study presented as part of the annual Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine meeting has revealed a link between microplastic bioaccumulation in the human placenta to preterm, or premature, births.

In the study, researchers analyzed 175 placentas collected at both term and preterm, or under 37 weeks of pregnancy, and measured the amounts of 12 different microplastics and nanoplastics, including polyethylene (PE), polyvinyl chloride (PVC), polyurethane (PU) and polyethylene terephthalate (PET), using highly sensitive mass spectrometry.

The results showed that preterm placentas had much higher levels of polycarbonate (PC), PVC and nylon 66 (N66) compared to placentas from term pregnancies. The findings suggested that despite shorter gestation periods, the placentas in preterm scenarios with higher levels of microplastics were accumulating those microplastics earlier in the gestation period.

“The finding of higher placental concentrations among preterm births was surprising because it was counterintuitive to what you might expect if it was merely a byproduct of the length of time of the pregnancy,” said Dr. Enrico Barrozo, lead author of the study and an assistant professor in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Baylor College of Medicine and Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston.

While microplastics in the placenta have not been named as a cause of preterm births in the study, the researchers noted that the association warrants further research to better understand potential impacts on reproductive health. 

In the study, the research team determined that microplastic levels in the placentas were nearly 122 times higher than the amount of microplastics that have been previously detected in human blood.

“Our study hints at the possibility that the accumulation of plastics could be contributing to the occurrence of preterm birth,” said Dr. Kjersti Aagaard, senior author of the study, the Gulf Coast Division medical director and maternal-fetal medicine physician at HCA Healthcare and research professor at Boston Children’s Hospital, as reported by The Guardian. “Combined with other recent research, this study adds to the growing body of evidence that demonstrates a real risk from exposure to plastics on human health and disease.”

In addition to the link between microplastics and preterm births, another study published in 2024 revealed that one in 10 premature births in the U.S. could be linked to parental exposure to phthalates, chemicals commonly used in plastic production to make plastics more flexible.

More and more studies are unveiling risks of microplastics, especially in regard to how they can accumulate in human and animal bodies. In a separate study published this month, researchers found that microplastics ingested by mice were blocking the blood vessels and blood flow in the animals’ brains. While the researchers of that study noted that human and mice brains are different enough that the findings cannot conclusively be applied to humans, they did raise concerns over how microplastics could be impacting our brains.

Microplastics have also been detected in human testicular tissue, blood and lungs, but researchers are still working to understand how these chemicals can affect our health. 

In the meantime, there are ways to reduce microplastic exposure, including by not microwaving food in plastic containers, filtering drinking water, limiting seafood consumption and avoiding plastics containing phthalates.

The post Microplastics in Human Placentas Linked to Premature Births appeared first on EcoWatch.

The decision by the previous Conservative government in the United Kingdom to approve the giant Rosebank oilfield off Shetland was ruled unlawful by an Edinburgh court on Thursday.

The judgment by Lord Ericht at the Court of Session said the carbon emissions that would be created by the burning of oil and gas at the largest untapped oilfield in the UK had not been taken into consideration.

“Today’s ruling is part of a clear trend we’re seeing from courts in the UK – marking the third time in the last year that judges have found that ‘downstream’ emissions must be considered in planning decisions,” said ClientEarth lawyer Robert Clarke, in a press release from ClientEarth. “This is a resounding signal from the courtroom that companies and governments can no longer turn a blind eye to the vast majority of the emissions their coal, oil and gas fields create.”

BREAKING: ROSEBANK OIL FIELD DECLARED UNLAWFUL! This is huge victory for climate justice + people power! Political attention must immediately turn to developing an urgent and fair transition plan for oil workers.

[image or embed]

— Friends of the Earth Scotland (@foescot.bsky.social) January 30, 2025 at 5:07 AM

The court also ruled that consent for Shell’s Jackdaw gas field was unlawful and that owners of both oilfields needed to seek new government approval before production could start, reported BBC News.

The judgment followed a case brought by Greenpeace and Uplift.

Lord Ericht said a more detailed environmental impact assessment would be needed that takes into account the climate effects of burning any extracted fossil fuels.

Work on both fields will be allowed to continue while the new information is gathered; however, no oil and gas can be extracted without the granting of new approval.

Permission for Rosebank’s North Atlantic oil development was given in 2023, while approval for the smaller Jackdaw gas field, located in the North Sea, was granted in the summer of 2022.

Lord Ericht wrote in the 57-page judgment that remaking the decision “on a lawful basis” was in the public interest due to the impacts of climate change, which outweighed the developers’ interests.

Uplift Executive Director Tessa Khan said the current Labour government should deny approval for both projects.

“The climate science is crystal clear that we can’t create new oil and gas fields if we’re going to stay within safe climate thresholds,” Khan said, as BBC News reported.

Philip Evans, a senior campaigner with Greenpeace, called the judgment “a historic win,” reported The Guardian.

“The age of governments approving new drilling sites by ignoring their climate impacts is over,” Evans said. “The courts have agreed with what climate campaigners have said all along: Rosebank and Jackdaw are unlawful, and their full climate impacts must now be properly considered.”

Campaigners had argued that oil and gas exploration in the North Sea would not bring any economic or energy security and that there was no climate rationale behind it.

“Any institutional investor, asset manager or lender backing new fossil fuel projects in the UK is now gambling on a high-risk strategy for its clients with financial prospects seriously in doubt,” Clarke said in the press release. “New fossil fuel projects in the UK have never been a riskier investment – and financial institutions both at home and abroad must take that into account when it comes to their portfolios.”

The International Energy Agency has repeatedly said that there should be no new drilling for oil and gas if we are to keep global heating from exceeding the 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold recommended by the 2015 Paris Agreement.

Climate activists and trade unions have argued that the UK government should be investing in renewable energy in order to meet climate goals and provide cheap and secure energy, The Guardian reported.

James Alexander, UK Sustainable Investment and Finance Association chief executive, called renewables the “UK’s key growth sector of the future.”

“That is where we should be focusing our upskilling efforts and attracting the billions available in private investment,” Alexander said.

The court’s ruling sends the decision on Rosebank — primarily owned by Equinor — and Jackdaw back to the government. A UK Department for Energy Security and Net Zero spokesperson said the government was receiving environmental guidance that takes emissions from oil and gas into account and was expected to deliver an update in the spring.

“We will respond to this consultation as soon as possible and developers will be able to apply for consents under this revised regime. Our priority is to deliver a fair, orderly and prosperous transition in the North Sea in line with our climate and legal obligations, which drives towards our clean energy future of energy security, lower bills, and good, long-term jobs,” the spokesperson said.

Stop Rosebank campaigner Lauren MacDonald said the development would bring more harm than benefits to Scotland.

“Almost all of Rosebank’s oil would be sold overseas, doing nothing to lower our bills or make us more secure, with most of the profits going straight to the state-backed Norwegian firm, Equinor,” MacDonald said, as reported by The Guardian. “It’s not fair that people here are now suffering the impacts of climate change, which is driven by fossil fuels and which will get worse as long as companies are allowed to open huge new drilling sites.”

The post In ‘Historic Win,’ Court Rules Against UK’s Rosebank Oilfield Over Climate Impacts appeared first on EcoWatch.

Forests growing along the edges of rivers in Brazil act as “highways” allowing tree species to traverse between the Atlantic and Amazon rainforests, a phenomenon that has been occurring for millions of years, according to new research led by University of Exeter and Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (RBGE).

Hundreds of miles of savanna and dry forest separate the two forests, where most rainforest tree species are unable to survive, a press release from University of Exeter said.

“Rather than tree species being exchanged during specific wetter periods in the past, we found that species have dispersed consistently over time,” said Dr. James Nicholls, a biodiversity genomics scientist with RBGE, in the press release. “This probably happens slowly, by generations of trees growing along the ‘highways’ provided by rivers that run through Brazil’s dry ecosystems.”

Before the study, scientists had believed that tree species only moved between the Atlantic and Amazon rainforests long ago, when Earth’s climate was wetter and a large swath of South America was rainforest.

However, the new study tells a different tale.

The research team — which included Brazilian scientists — studied 164 Inga tree species, commonly found in Latin American rainforests.

Through DNA analysis, the team was able to reconstruct the “family tree” of the trees, which enabled them to see when each of the species split from its ancestors. The researchers then mapped the location of each tree species, allowing them to discover patterns of movement between rainforests.

Images of Inga demonstrating biological characteristics and the humid forest adaptations of this genus. Clockwise from top left: flowers of I. sessilis from the Mata Atlântica; I. cinnamomea from Amazônia showing the fleshy sarcotesta, an adaptation facilitating primate dispersal; germinating naked I. edulis seeds, Amazônia, showing lack of drought adaptations; I. affinis growing alongside a river in Central Brazil, showing riverside habitat traversing drier cerrado vegetation; large edible legume of I. spectabilis, Amazônia; flowers of I. lineata, Amazônia. All photos by R.T. Pennington.

From 16 to 20 “dispersal events” were discovered, when tree species that came from the Amazon to the Atlantic rainforest successfully established themselves. These events happened throughout the Inga tree species’ evolutionary history, not only during periods of humid forest cover over much of Brazil.

On the other hand, the research team found just one or two occurrences of species moving from the Atlantic rainforest to the Amazon. They believe this may be a reflection of the forests’ relative size — the vast Amazon produces a bigger outflow of tree seeds.

The findings of the study highlight the importance of riverside forest conservation. Riverside forests are protected under Brazilian law.

“This legal protection – and efforts to preserve these riverside forests – are highly valuable for long-term habitat connectivity,” said professor of tropical plant diversity and biogeography Toby Pennington with University of Exeter’s Global Systems Institute and RGBE, in the press release. “The study also tells us something fundamental about the history of the incredible biodiversity of the Atlantic rainforest, which contains about 3,000 more plant species than the Brazilian Amazon. Only 20% of the Atlantic rainforest now remains intact. In the short term, we need to protect these precious rainforests. In the long term, our study shows that we must also conserve the connections between them.”

The paper, “Continuous colonization of the Atlantic coastal rain forests of South America from Amazônia,” was published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

The post Hidden ‘Highways’ Connect Brazilian Rainforests, Aiding Dispersal of Tree Species, Research Reveals appeared first on EcoWatch.

With so many media sources these days — commercial television, social media, old-fashioned newspapers — some are bound to be more reliable in terms of accuracy than others.

Researchers have found that people who believe climate change is a conspiracy get most of their news and information about current events from social and commercial media sources.

After Donald Trump was reelected president, chief executive of Meta Mark Zuckerberg fired his company’s social media fact-checkers, with the intention of replacing them with a “community notes” format like the one used by Elon Musk’s platform X. The model relies on corrections added by users to posts that are false or misleading, Mark Andrejevic, a media professor at Monash University’s School of Media, Film, and Journalism, wrote in The Conversation.

The model has been described by Musk as “citizen journalism, where you hear from the people. It’s by the people, for the people.”

However, for this to work, the “citizen journalists,” as well as their readers, must value accuracy, accountability and “good-faith deliberation,” Andrejevic said.

“This is why it’s been so interesting to hear in recent weeks how social media is actually turning away from factchecking: because they’re pretending – and I think it’s a pretence – that they’re being more hands-off; but they’re not hands-off, because they build these algorithms to pump stuff into our feeds,” Andrejevic told Guardian Australia. “Algorithms do that based only on commercial values: is it viral, will it get engagement, will it get attention? Not at all on: is it important, accurate or useful for participating in democracy?”

New research by Andrejevic and his team, conducted in partnership with Essential Media, looked into what those who use social media think of everyday civic values.

For their research report, “Mapping civic disposition, media use and affective polarisation,” the team reviewed existing studies on political polarisation and social cohesion, conducted 10 focus groups and compiled a scale of civic values. The scale aimed to measure people’s levels of trust in the government and media institutions, along with their openness to considering perspectives of others that challenge their own.

The researchers conducted a survey of 2,046 Australians, asking them how strong their belief was in “a common public interest.” They also asked how important it was to them for Australians to be informed about political issues and for civics to be taught in schools.

They inquired about the respondents’ news sources: commercial television, commercial radio, social media, newspapers or non-commercial media.

More than a third of those who relied mainly on commercial television and radio for most of their news agreed with the statement, “fluctuations in the climate are the result of natural cycles that take place regardless of human activity,” reported The Guardian.

A quarter of respondents who primarily got their news from social media believed that the climate crisis was a conspiracy. On the other hand, those who did not believe in climate change conspiracies more often got their information from the public broadcasters SBS and ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation).

Just two percent who relied on public radio for their news and six percent for whom public television was their main source believed climate change was a conspiracy.

“We found people who rely on social media for news score significantly lower on a civic values scale than those who rely on newspapers and non-commercial broadcasters such as the ABC,” Andrejevic wrote in The Conversation. “By contrast, people who rely on non-commercial radio scored highest on the civic values scale.”

Those who relied mostly on non-commercial radio had scores that were 11 percent higher than respondents who relied on social media and 12 percent higher than those who used commercial television as their primary news source. People who relied mainly on commercial radio had the lowest scores.

People who mostly read newspapers, watched non-commercial television and looked to online news aggregators scored higher than those who were reliant on commercial broadcasting and social media.

The survey found that civic value scores went up as the number of media sources people used on a daily basis increased.

“The point of the civic values scale we developed is to highlight the fact that the values people bring to news about the world is as important as the news content,” Andrejevic explained in The Conversation. “For example, most people in the United States have likely heard about the violence of the attack on the Capitol protesting Trump’s loss in 2020. That Trump and his supporters can recast this violent riot as ‘a day of love’ is not the result of a lack of information. It is, rather, a symptom of people’s lack of trust in media and government institutions and their unwillingness to confront facts that challenge their views. In other words, it is not enough to provide people with accurate information. What counts is the mindset they bring to that information.”

So do social media platforms cultivate lower civic values or just cater to them?

“We don’t have the evidence to answer that,” Andrejevic told Guardian Australia. “It could be that social media just attracts people who score lower on these questions; and people who listen to ABC radio tend to score higher because they seek that out.”

Andrejevic pointed out that the long-term concern of social media critics has been that the platforms favor virality and sensationalism over thoughtfulness and accuracy, which does not help democracy.

“Free speech is based on the idea that people have been educated enough in the values of civil society to be willing to engage in good faith discussion, but what you see online is that doesn’t happen at all,” Andrejevic told Guardian Australia. “We wanted to see how the different media actually cater to scoring higher or lower on this set of values that we think are important for democracy.”

According to sociologist Zeynep Tufekci, social media is more about “mocking perceived opponents” and bonding with those who share similar views than meaningful engagement, Andrejevic wrote in The Conversation.

“Platforms want to wash their hands of the fact-checking process, because it is politically fraught. Their owners claim they want to encourage the free flow of information,” Andrejevic said. “However, their fingers are on the scale. The algorithms they craft play a central role in deciding which forms of expression make it into our feeds and which do not.

“It’s disingenuous for them to abdicate responsibility for the content they chose to pump into people’s news feeds, especially when they have systematically created a civically challenged media environment,” Andrejevic added.

The post People Who Get Most of Their News From Social Media Sources Are More Likely to Think Climate Change Is a Conspiracy: Study appeared first on EcoWatch.

As microplastics become more and more prevalent, even showing up in seafood, clouds and human testicular tissue, scientists are working to further understand how these plastic particles could impact ecosystems and human health. Based on a new study, scientists are now concerned about how microplastics could affect our brains after finding that the particles can block blood flow in mice brains in the lab.

The study, published in Science Advances, involved the tracking of fluorescent polystyrene in mice blood and brains. The polystyrene, which is common in packaging like clear food containers and insulated beverage cups, was mixed with water and given to the mice. The researchers used miniature two-photon microscopy on mice to track the movement of the microplastics through clear screens placed in their skulls.

The researchers observed that the microplastics accumulated in immune cells, which then created blockages “like a car crash in the blood vessels,” Haipeng Huang, a biomedical researcher at Peking University in Beijing, said in a statement.

Sometimes, these blockages, which were similar to blood clots according to the research team, would clear on their own. However, other blockages remained for four full weeks.

Whether they lasted short-term or for the entire duration of the observation period, mice with microplastic blockages experienced reduced blood flow and moved slower and with less coordination compared to control mice, Yale Environment 360 reported.

The research team has also observed microplastic blockages in mice hearts and livers, but those studies have not yet been published.

The scientists also cautioned that while these results can bring up concerns over how microplastics may affect human health, the findings cannot conclusively be applied to humans because of the differences in blood circulation volume and vessel sizes between humans and mice. However, they did note that the research could provide foundational information for future studies.

“The potential long-term effects of [microplastics] on neurological disorders such as depression and cardiovascular health are concerning,” the authors stated. “Increased investment in this area of research is urgent and essential to fully comprehend the health risks posed by [microplastics] in human blood.”

According to a separate study published in April 2024, ingested microplastics were found to move from the human gut to the brain. Another study published in August 2024 further found microplastics in human livers, kidneys and brains, with alarming levels of these particles in the human brain samples.
In yet another recent study published this month, scientists determined that microplastics could pose risks to various human functions outside of the brain, including the respiratory system, the digestive tract and the reproductive system.

The post Microplastics Block Blood Flow in Mice Brains, Study Shows appeared first on EcoWatch.