The cable industry's primary lobby group is seeking a waiver of the Federal Communications Commission ban on foreign routers, warning of potential chaos if cable Internet service providers can't change some of the components in routers they offer to home broadband users.

In March, the FCC added all consumer-grade routers made at least partly outside the US to its Covered List, which imposes restrictions on devices deemed to pose an unacceptable risk to national security. The change affected virtually all consumer routers, preventing new or changed models from being imported into or sold in the US.

In a petition filed on Tuesday, NCTA-The Internet & Television Association asked the FCC to grant an expedited waiver allowing its members' suppliers to "substitute substrate materials and memory modules in the previously certified routers that are now on the Covered List" as long as the changes "are otherwise consistent" with FCC regulations.

These changes would not alter the functionality of previously authorized devices and would not swap US-produced components for foreign-produced ones, the NCTA said. The component changes are apparently needed to continue production of routers that were approved by the FCC before the Covered List update.

"NCTA requests an expedited grant of this waiver to enable its members and their suppliers to navigate unavoidable supply chain shortages and prevent disruptions in the availability of broadband for NCTA members’ customers, while still fulfilling the rules’ national security and public safety purpose," the NCTA said. It argued that "good cause exists to prevent disruptions to millions of Americans’ broadband services."

Memory and substrate shortages

The FCC last month granted a one-year waiver to AT&T's suppliers, similar to the waiver requested by the NCTA for all cable broadband companies. "NCTA’s suppliers are similarly situated" to AT&T's, the cable lobby group's filing said.

While many Internet users buy their own Wi-Fi routers from the vendor of their choice, it's common for Internet subscribers to use the hardware leased or sold by their broadband provider. The NCTA said that because all consumer-grade routers are now on the FCC's Covered List, certain "changes are prohibited by the FCC’s rules."

While the FCC is trying to force companies to move manufacturing to the US, the NCTA said the whole industry is constrained by shortages:

Like AT&T, NCTA members are encouraging their suppliers to quickly pursue required onshoring, and, in the meantime, seek Conditional Approvals for Covered Routers as necessary. However, unavoidable supply chain shortages in critical substrate material and memory modules (including both volatile and nonvolatile memory) significantly constrain the industry. AT&T’s suppliers are not unique; the same impediments they are experiencing impose inevitable limitations on NCTA’s suppliers. Accordingly, NCTA seeks the same relief on behalf of its suppliers. Given the immediacy of these issues and the concrete harms that would result from disruptions to the availability of broadband to large swaths of US consumers and businesses, the grant of this Petition is warranted.

The memory shortage is a well-known problem, and the NCTA said cable firms' vendors are "facing significant lead-times to find alternatives for memory to use in routers." The NCTA said its members’ suppliers also "face the repercussions of a global shortage for semiconductor substrates, a critical component for electronic devices."

NCTA cites "delays and supply chain constraints"

The NCTA explained that "artificial intelligence is driving unprecedented demands for substrate materials, leading to a growing shortage of the necessary materials for semiconductor manufacturing... Persistent industry-wide substrate shortages have caused delays and supply chain constraints, triggered by increased demand and material shortages."

The FCC last month ruled that existing routers can receive software and firmware updates until at least January 1, 2029. This applies to Class I and Class II "permissive changes," which are supposed to be minimal compared to Class III changes that face more scrutiny to ensure compliance with FCC rules.

AT&T separately received permission for its suppliers to make Class I and Class II hardware changes, the NCTA said. AT&T's suppliers may thus "substitute certain substrate components in existing router designs to allow those routers to remain in production," and "take the steps necessary to swap the memory used in existing designs."

AT&T pointed out in its successful petition that software and firmware changes "are not the only updates necessary to ensure continued functionality of previously approved devices." But as of now, "Class I and Class II permissive hardware changes remain prohibited for other providers," the NCTA said.

FCC router ban adds layer of bureaucracy

Before the FCC added all foreign-made routers to the Covered List, cable companies could make the necessary changes without special permission, the NCTA said:

With respect to permissive changes for routers, alternative sources as well as higher density sources such as 64GB eMMC are generally a pin-to-pin and footprint-compatible replacement for a lower-density part, so it can be placed directly onto the existing routers without other changes to device hardware. Prior to foreign-made routers being added to the Covered List, this change would generally have been classified as a Class I permissive change, as it involves no degradation to device performance and requires no changes to the device or other hardware components. However, NCTA members’ suppliers now cannot pursue these memory changes given the prohibitions of permissive changes for router hardware.

Router makers may seek "conditional approvals" to let them import and sell new models, and must submit a justification for the use of foreign manufacturing and a “detailed, time-bound plan to establish or expand manufacturing in the United States.” The process includes more than just the FCC, as hardware makers must obtain a determination from the Department of Defense or Department of Homeland Security that the router does not pose national security risks.

Netgear and others, such as Amazon's Eero subsidiary, were quick to apply for and obtain conditional approvals. Chinese companies are expected to have the most trouble obtaining exemptions. The process also applies to foreign-made drones and adds a layer of bureaucracy for hardware makers that want to update existing products or import new models.

The NCTA said the waiver it seeks will prevent problems while cable ISPs and their vendors navigate the process of obtaining company-specific exemptions.

"The targeted waiver requested by NCTA on behalf of its suppliers would allow continued production of existing devices in the near term while members work with their suppliers on Conditional Approval requests, and is intended to prevent sudden and abrupt disruptions that would harm vast swaths of American consumers who are NCTA members’ customers," the NCTA said.

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We car geeks like to discuss the goings-on over at car auction site Bring A Trailer. Often those discussions revolve around price — things like how a pile of rust roughly in the shape of a Porsche 911 can sell for almost $9,000 or how someone accidentally bid $100,000 on an Acura NSX. And now I think something just happened at Bring A Trailer that is very worthy of discussion: an International Scout – actually, wait, it’s technically two International Scouts, sort of (a project frame and a parts car) just sold for the incredible sum of $10.

Yes, $10. The auction was listed as having no reserve, and damn, was that proven accurate. Ten bucks. That’s less than the cost of a McDonalds Quarter Pounder Meal. With cheese, I mean. And instead of a floppy burger the winner of the auction gets the frame and front tub of a 1980 International Scout II, along with a complete – if quite rusty – 1976 International Scout equipped with a 345 cubic inch V8 and a four-speed manual transmission.

Here’s what the auction description says about what’s included in the auction:

This project vehicle includes the frame and front tub from a 1980 International Harvester Scout II as well as a 1976 Scout II body and drivetrain. The 1980 frame remained under original ownership until the seller’s purchase in 2025, and it was refinished and fitted with Rough Country leaf springs within the same year. The 1976 vehicle is equipped with a 345ci V8, a four-speed manual transmission, and a dual-range transfer case, and it featured faded red paint over beige upholstery. Additional equipment includes 15″ steel wheels, a white hardtop, and a tow ball. This non-running project is offered at no reserve with a clean Michigan title for the 1980 vehicle and a bill of sale for the 1976 donor vehicle.

This has to be the lowest BaT auction sale price ever, right? There’s been some cars that have sold for $100, like this Fiat 124, but that’s still ten times as much money as this one. It’s definitely the lowest price an International Scout II has sold for on the site, as you can see on this chart:

Ten bucks. By weight, that would be, let’s see, a Scout II is about 3,600 pounds, and I figure there’s what, maybe a few hundred pounds of frame and tub from the “project” Scout? Let’s call it 4,000 pounds of Scout to keep the math easy, which means that the winner of this auction spent $0.0025 per pound of International Scout II, which is, as you may have guessed, a hell of a deal.

Just in scrap metal prices, which range from six cents to 22 cents per pound for steel, the buyer would make a killing (the project is worth a few hundred bucks in scrap, though shipping prices will eat into that). I hope the buyer doesn’t decide to do that, of course. Far better would be to make one running Scout II from this frame and the parts Scout and just tell every single person you encounter in the car that you paid $10 for the car at auction.

There’s a tow ball included in this auction. That tow ball alone is probably worth $10. Same with a single one of these wheels:

Bring A Trailer charges a flat fee of $99 to list the car, so the seller is already in the hole for $89 with this sale. Then, on top of that, the buyer pays a 5% (that’d be a nickel in this case) or 10% (a dime), but there’s also a minimum fee of $250, 25 times the sale price.

I can’t imagine the seller feels great about this, but I imagine the buyer is pretty delighted. Maybe the seller is just happy to have it all gone without having to scrap it?

I hope both of them, together, at least feel a bit of pride in undertaking what has to be the lowest Bring A Trailer transaction ever in the site’s 245,000-auction history. Sales like this give unreasonable hope for all of us unrealistically cheap bastards with terrible impulse control, and that’s worth more than even $10 can buy. Maybe even $20.

 

The post Holy Crap An International Scout Project Just Sold On Bring A Trailer For Less Than Two Gallons Of Gas appeared first on The Autopian.

More and more routine vaccines are being linked to lower risks of dementia. Shots against seasonal flu, RSV, tetanus, diphtheria, and pertussis (Tdap), pneumococcal infections, hepatitis A and B, and typhoid have all been linked to lower risks. And one of the strongest connections is from vaccination against shingles, with more data supporting the link still coming in. But as the evidence mounts, scientists continue to puzzle over the pleasant surprise—how are vaccines that target specific pathogens inadvertently shielding our minds from deterioration?

A burgeoning hypothesis offers a brow-raising possibility: The shots may be protecting our noggins by training the part of our immune system that had long been considered untrainable. If the idea holds up, it could generate a deeper understanding of fundamental aspects of our immune systems while opening new avenues to treating or preventing dementia. It could also add another dimension to the benefits of vaccines, which already save millions of lives worldwide.

Trained immunity

It's well understood how vaccines work generally; they're designed to prime our immune systems against specific pathogens. Vaccines present either defanged pathogens or distinctive fragments of them to specialized immune cells—namely, T cells and antibody-producing B cells—that can then learn to identify those microbial enemies.

So if such a pathogen stages an attack after immunization, those immune cells will be able to recognize the invaders quickly and destroy them. This process, as intended, engages adaptive immune responses, the part of the immune system known to be trainable. It can learn to target specific threats—and remember those threats, aka immunologic memory.

Then there's the other part of the immune system, the innate immune responses. These precede adaptive responses, acting as first-line, non-specific defenses against germs and injury. Innate defenses include everything from physical barriers—skin, mucous, gastric acid—to immune cells that can indiscriminately gobble invaders, as well as chemical signals that can swiftly ignite generic inflammation.

For decades, the innate immune response was considered relatively static—not one that evolves or hones itself as new threats are encountered. But that changed in 2011 with the coining of the term "trained immunity" to explain changes documented in innate immune responses from past exposures. Trained immunity occurs when cells involved in innate responses are activated and then primed by generic signals from a germ. Those primed cells acquire and maintain changes that allow them to respond to those germ signals faster and with more intensity the next time they're encountered.

Specifically, the changes observed in trained immunity are epigenetic. These don't alter the underlying DNA sequence of the cells but are modifications or chemical tags that alter gene activity. In the case of trained immunity, the changes may involve genes coding for pro-inflammatory signals that make those genes more active when the same germ signal is encountered again. Ultimately, this would lead to a stronger inflammatory response. Similar to adaptive responses, these epigenetic changes stick around afterward, creating another type of immunologic memory.

Quirky vaccines

So how does this connect to vaccines? The concept of trained immunity was solidified by data involving a vaccine—but one that's far from routine in the US: the quirky Bacillus Calmette-Guérin (BCG) vaccine, which was designed to protect against tuberculosis, caused by the bacterium Mycobacterium tuberculosis, but also used to treat bladder cancer (it's still unclear how the vaccine works against this cancer).

Nevertheless, in 2012, researchers in the Netherlands conducted an experiment to investigate trained immunity in mice engineered to lack adaptive immune responses—they had no T cells or B cells. The researchers vaccinated the weakened animals with BCG, looking for changes in innate responses, the only responses the mice had.

The researchers found that the shot not only bolstered the rodents' innate protective responses against M. tuberculosis but also boosted responses against an unrelated yeast pathogen, Candida albicans. Further work suggested similar trained immunity occurred in humans.

In the same study, the researchers examined blood samples from healthy human trial participants before and after immunization with BCG. After vaccination, the researchers found that immune cells in their blood produced stronger innate responses (pro-inflammatory signals) to M. tuberculosis than they did before the shot. They also produced stronger responses to C. albicans and the bacterial pathogen Staphylococcus aureus, suggesting non-specific trained immunity. The study was published in PNAS.

Since then, researchers have built a body of evidence to support and understand trained immunity. But in the past few years, the idea has collided with a steady stream of large population studies that have found that vaccines seem to protect against dementia. While most of the big studies that have made headlines have focused on routine vaccines—shingles and the flu, for example, a study in 2023 found that the BCG vaccine is also associated with a significantly lower risk of dementia.

In March, vaccine researchers in Belgium and South Africa, led by Justin Devine, put the findings together, including all the work on BCG, and published a hypothesis: Perhaps trained immunity from vaccines is behind the lower risks of dementia.

Prior to this, a leading hypothesis for the connection was that vaccines reduce the risk of dementia directly by preventing infections that can lead to inflammation in the brain, which, over time, could cause deterioration. This is particularly a strong hypothesis for the shingles vaccine. Shingles is caused by the varicella-zoster virus, which initially causes chickenpox but then lingers in the body, staying mostly dormant in nerve cells. It can reactivate any time there's a fault in the immune system, which often happens in older age, when immune responses naturally wane.

A shot of a shingles vaccine blocks reactivation, potentially preventing the virus from triggering brain inflammation that could contribute to the development of dementia. Conversely, there's some evidence that having shingles may increase the risk of dementia.

A possible mechanism

But not every vaccine linked to reduced dementia risk comes with such an explanation for how it may protect the brain. For example, the seasonal flu vaccine seems to reduce dementia, but it's unclear how. Still, in a large retrospective study published last month, researchers again bolstered the link between the seasonal flu shot and lower risks of dementia, this time finding that high-dose seasonal flu shots given to older patients are yet more protective against dementia than standard doses.

In other words, there seems to be a dose-dependent response—the higher the flu vaccine dose, the lower the dementia risk. The authors don't speculate on how the seasonal shot could affect cognitive health, but they call for more research into potential mechanisms, including trained immunity.

In the March hypothesis piece, published in the journal Frontiers in Immunology, Devine and colleagues hypothesize that trained immunity from vaccinations could indeed be responsible.

"A central element in this immunological model is that uncontrolled or excessive levels of neuro-inflammation, associated with elevated dementia risk, can be counteracted by epigenetic reprogramming of innate immune cells," they write.

For instance, it may be that the nonspecific changes to innate responses from vaccines are able to keep both targeted and non-targeted pathogens in check, preventing brain inflammation from flaring up, they say.

For now, the idea is just a hypothesis, and there's a lot more work needed to validate it. But the stakes are high for pursuing it, the researchers argue. "Elucidating the mechanisms underlying these promising observations may open new avenues to promote healthy aging through vaccination and could be crucial for alleviating the global burden of dementia," they write.

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In recent years, many overworked doctors have turned to so-called AI medical scribes to help automatically summarize patient conversations, diagnoses, and care decisions into structured notes for health record logging. But a recent audit by the auditor general of Ontario found that AI scribes recommended by the provincial government regularly generated incorrect, incomplete and hallucinated information that could "potentially result in inadequate or harmful treatment plans that may potentially impact patient health outcomes."

In a recent report on Use of Artificial Intelligence in the Ontario Government, the auditor general reviewed transcription tests of two simulated patient-doctor conversations performed across 20 AI scribe vendors that were approved and pre-qualified by the provincial government for purchase by healthcare providers. All 20 of those vendors showed some issue with accuracy or completeness in at least one of these simple tests, including nine that hallucinated patient information, 12 that recorded information incorrectly, and 17 that missed key details about discussed mental health issues.

In the report, the auditor general points out multiple concerning examples of mistakes in those summaries that could have a direct and negative impact on a patient's subsequent care. That includes situations where an AI scribe hallucinated nonexistent referrals for blood tests or therapy, incorrectly transcribed the names of prescription medication, and/or missed "key details" of mental health issues discussed in the simulated conversations.

Across all approved vendors, the average tested AI scribe scored only a 12 out of 20 on the "accuracy of medical notes generated" section of Supply Ontario's evaluation rubric. But that seemingly key "accuracy" metric was only responsible for about 4 percent of a vendor's overall score, making it easy to meet the minimum threshold for approval even if an AI scribe scored a "zero" on the accuracy metric (a separate metric measuring "domestic presence in Ontario" was worth 30 percent of the overall scoring).

All these factors contributed to the auditor general's overall finding that these AI scribes "were not evaluated adequately." In a display of restraint and understatement, the report notes that "it is important that AI scribe systems are tested to provide assurances as to the quality of their generated notes and to minimize inaccuracies." It also recommends that IT departments using these scribes force doctors to "confirm their review of the notes produced" before committing them to patient logs.

Public sector health services in Ontario are not required to use these AI scribe systems in their work and may purchase scribes from non-approved vendors if they wish. Still, the fact that the Ontario government recommended AI summary systems with such obvious and potentially patient-harming flaws should give pause to any doctors (or their patients) making use of them.

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Beneath the low hum of interstate traffic punctuated by the treble of birdsong, Anne Marie Mozrall directs her team of researchers preparing to gather data on the troubling confluence of the manufactured and natural worlds.

While field workers stage on the Old 17th Avenue pedestrian bridge over the South Platte River in downtown Denver, bikers, runners, dog-walkers and assorted passers by on a brilliant spring morning slow and stare. They see one team member lean into a pump to inflate a small kayak. Others unpack and stretch a 20-foot-long cone of nylon netting, calibrate instruments and slip into chest-high waders.

One onlooker approaches Mozrall and asks if she’s looking to catch fish. But the team from the Colorado School of Mines is angling to capture another pervasive resident of the waterway: microplastics. 

Mozrall, a 28-year-old doctoral candidate whose dissertation gave rise to this project, lays the groundwork for a solution to the infiltration of microplastics — defined as particles less than 5 mm long — into virtually every aspect of our lives, from fishing streams to bloodstreams. Working with both undergraduates and master’s students, she explores segments of the urban South Platte to determine the amount and types of microplastics that end up in the waterway.

Afterward, lab analysis of the day’s catch will yield further clues to the origin of the material. And overall, the students establish a workflow within the team for future research that extends beyond rivers to oceans and beaches, drinking water and even soil samples.

Although awareness of microplastics as a potential health concern has grown, Mozrall notes that there are still lots of gaps in understanding where they come from and the effects they have on the environment. Her research seeks to quantify some basic questions: How many microplastics end up in the river? What kinds? How big are they? And secondarily, where do they come from?

“There’s still a huge need for primary data, and we can’t model these plastics,” she says. “We can’t establish risk or impacts from microplastics without really understanding where they are, how they move and what’s going on with them. We’re also striving toward understanding them at large better and how they interact with our urban river systems.”

Through connections with Instituto Tecnológico de Santo Domingo, a private university in the Dominican Republic known as INTEC, Mozrall and her Mines colleagues forged a collaboration.  Researchers at both schools have expanded their work to include the Ozama River — a somewhat larger (and more polluted) urban waterway in an area with a similar population density to Denver. 

Mozrall pitched a study that would add a microplastics element to the research, she says, in order to figure out whether microplastics are appearing in similar concentrations and with similar polymer types to the macroplastics that have been observed — or whether they’re functioning in a totally different system.

“There is a very small number of studies that have been done in the Caribbean on microplastics, and nearly no microplastic research in the Dominican Republic,” she says. “And so our research there is really, really ground zero. I think the study we’re hoping to put out would probably be one of the first microplastic studies in the DR.”

Among other findings, the comparison of the two rivers could help determine whether the level of waste management — advanced in Denver compared to the Dominican Republic — could be a factor in the presence of microplastics.

As part of the exchange with Mines, Laura Aquino, a 23-year-old lab technician from INTEC, has joined students from the Golden school to gather data in Denver. Crouching by the bridge railing, she calibrates a flow meter that will measure the rate that the South Platte’s current passes through the net they will use to collect microplastic samples.

She has already seen characteristics that set the rivers in the two countries apart.

“The river water, the looks of it, the parameters that we’re measuring, they’re very different,” Aquino says. “The DR river is more polluted than the Denver rivers. The microplastic content, it’s actually very different between them. We’re still in the preliminary parts of the experiments, but there’s very much a difference.” 

Sampling the South Platte

Before the researchers cast their net for samples, they carry the now fully formed kayak to the river’s edge and launch it into the middle of the lazy current. With a pipe-shaped pumping device, one of the students paddles to different locations and takes water samples from close to the surface and then the subsurface. Plastics have different densities — some float, some sink and some are suspended in between.

Finally, students lower the tubular net into the river by two ropes from atop the bridge. The calibrated flow meter sits centered at the mouth of the tube, spinning with the passage of water. 

The net, whose mesh openings are a tiny 335 micrometers (barely more than 1/100th of an inch), remains submerged for five minutes before the researchers begin pulling it back up to the bridge. By changing out bags with even smaller mesh (between 125 and 250 micrometers) inside the net, the researchers can collect multiple samples without thoroughly cleaning the primary net in between. 

Based on the amount of plastic collected, they’ll have usable data — basically, particles per unit of water — produced by an equation that takes into account the time, flow rate and diameter of the net. 

From there, Mozrall explains, the researchers can return to the lab and process the day’s samples to determine how much of which types of plastics fall in various ranges of size, shape and type.

“Just seeing the volume of plastic that we capture is really alarming sometimes,” she says. “And just shocking.”

Ginger Juzefyk, a 21-year-old senior at Mines who works on the microplastics research team, grew up on the water in New Jersey — Barnegat Bay, which has suffered over the years from pollution carried by rivers that feed it. So the presence of microplastics is, for her, kind of personal.

“Once we have those numbers, once we have those statistics,” she says, “I think it could be really eye opening for people. Just being able to look at a sample of river water and be like, ‘Wow, you can visibly see microplastics in that’ is just a good educational tool.”

Just three days earlier, the project team had done a similar sample collection a few miles upstream, near Chatfield Reservoir, and has plans to do others in the coming days at various locations within the city limits. But here, in the shadow of Empower Field at Mile High, the students work by a storm drain where water — likely the last of the runoff from a spring snowstorm — trickles across the concrete past an empty plastic milk jug and other containers. It’s yet another possible source for microplastics that end up in the river.

Elsa Scherzinger, a 22-year-old master’s student at Mines, met Mozrall in the research lab at the chemistry department when she was still an undergraduate. Although her master’s is focused on environmental modeling, her love of the “water space” made the river-centered microplastics project a natural fit.

“Microplastics are everywhere,” Scherzinger says. “We hear about it all the time, right? ‘Don’t eat on Teflon because microplastics are there.’ But I think protecting our waterways is really important. And I think studying microplastics and seeing where they are is the basis of what we can do. Because once you know where it is, then we can start to make strategies for how to deal with microplastics from there.”

In the lab, the process of analyzing the polymers can be time consuming, but Mozrall hopes to have usable data by some point this summer. The results will probably appear in the form of a peer reviewed publication for further input from the scientific community. 

“I also would love to see how we can get the city involved with some of the data that we’re finding,” Mozrall says, “and see if there’s anything that we can do from more of a legislative standpoint to try to deter these plastics from entering the river in the first place.”

The early analysis of the Denver samples has revealed a lot of tire wear particles — bits of rubber from bike or car tires that eventually find their way into the river via storm drain runoff like the trickle that empties into the South Platte where the researchers sift through its flow.

Mozrall also has noticed a lot of polyethylene, the ubiquitous polymer that’s part of … almost everything, from bags to consumer packaging and lots in between. Its overwhelming presence from such a variety of sources makes it inherently difficult to track. Plus, it’s difficult to determine at what phase it entered the river.

“There could be some pieces that sat in farm soil for 10 years and then a big rain came along and finally washed it into the river,” she says. “Or we could have a particle that just fell off someone’s bike tire five minutes ago — and that could all be in the same sample.” 

By imaging and scanning the particles, the researchers can look for telltale signs like biofilm accumulation or weathering that might offer clues to their origin. But even those can be a mystery. Weathering, for instance, could point toward a particle being in the river for a decade, or just as easily becoming worn from a bumpy trip along river rocks on the journey to Denver from Chatfield Reservoir.

The research team eventually packs up and moves downstream a short distance to City of Cuernavaca Park to take additional samples — there’s a bigger haul here, possibly because the nearby confluence with Cherry Creek bolsters the South Platte’s flow — before the focus shifts back to the lab on Mines’ Golden campus.

The first step involves separating the water from the samples themselves, then adding a “digestion” solution that chemically eats away at the organic material, followed by a density separation that employs another type of solution in which sediments sink, but the plastics float.

Once separated, the plastics get a good rinse with purified, laboratory-grade water. Finally, they’re ready to be scanned, analyzed and become part of the record.

But beyond the data itself, Mozrall has a more general, overarching goal — to make the information available and understandable to people who may not have a science background. 

“Microplastics are such a buzzword right now, and they’re really scary to a lot of people,” she says. “I think understanding more of the science helps to be able to digest it and know what is going on and what you can do to control your own exposure.”