Right, even if we were immortal until killed like vampires or Tolkien elves there'd still be selective pressure based on who had more children to increase their signal in the population.

Unless typing and mousing affect your reproductive success then you're describing lamarkism rather than darwinism. But increased fine motor control would affect reproductive success over a longer period of time and be increasingly useful in a more technological society regardless of occupation.

I didn't read the paper yet but if 'the smoking gene' is a predisposition to addiction more generally than it'd make sense it be selected against before tobacco use became prevalent.

Microsoft tried that with the Duo, it didn't sell very well, although the software was rather poor compared to Samsung's software for their Fold.

Battery replacement for a laptop is going to be the main thing for getting it to last more than 5 years in an as-new state of usefulness.

Hey man they validated this tool by comparing it with a dowsing rod, it's totally legit and worth the project budget

I wasn't disagreeing with what he said I was correcting the interpretation of how strongly worded what he said was. Like if a Briton makes a joke the direct reading and the correct reading may not be obvious to all audiences. What the body can clear is dependent on its solubility in water and peroxide, generally. Your body will build granulomas around other buildups it can recognize but not dispose of. It's why, say, asbestos or graphite tend to stay put once they get inside you, water soluble vitamins shoot on through, fat soluble things can poison you but will diffuse back out eventually. This is also why the article points out differential concentration of microplastics in different types of tissues, and why concentrations in brain tissue are of particular concern because things don't diffuse back out of it easily. Particle size also matters, e.g. dust exposure of microparticulates of something as otherwise mundane as wood can end up directly dissolved in your blood. In those cases, though, the worst likely outcome is immunogenicity because your body can 'see' such natural proteins readily. If it is hypoallergenic then it is comparatively invisible and you're depending on diffusion and solution buffering to save you.

The research I work with doesn't touch this sort of microplastics, but you seem to be confused regarding your preferred interpretation of what isn't a particularly hard to understand research paper, how couched in tentative language it is written, why a researcher would write it that way, and how they'd intend for it to be understood.

Yes that's what I was referring to as speculation.

I'm talking about what they said in their summary and the body of their paper rather than the linked news article.

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.