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You Contain Multitudes of Microplastics

你的體內含有大量微塑料

Plastic is lightweight, malleable, durable. But it has also become so widespread that it’s ending up in a lot of unwanted places—including our own bodies. That’s according to a new study, which found that humans are consuming a shocking amount of so-called "microplastics."

塑料具有重量輕、可塑性強、經久耐用的特點。但它也因此變得特別普遍，總是出現在一些不該出現的地方——包括我們自己的體內。據一項新的研究顯示，人類正在攝入大量所謂的“微塑料”。

"Microplastics, the kind of current working definition, is plastic less than five millimeters. So people commonly equate that to something like a grain of rice or a sesame seed and down in terms of size class. I will say that most of the microplastics that people are interacting with are quite a bit smaller than the sesame seed size, which I think always kinds of shocks people when we start talking about the numbers because the kind of, you know, they can’t see a lot of these things, at least with the naked eye." Kieran Cox, a PhD candidate in marine biology at the University of Victoria in Canada and one of the authors of the study, which is in the journal Environmental Science & Technology.

該研究的作者之一、加拿大維多利亞大學海洋生物學博士基蘭·考克斯說“根據當前的定義，微塑料指的是粒徑小于5毫米的塑料。所以在大小上，人們通常把它等同于一粒米或一顆芝麻，甚至是比它們還要小的東西。而我要說的是，人類正在接觸的大多數微塑料要比芝麻粒小得多。在我看來，當我們開始討論這些數字時，人們常常會感到很震驚，因為很多這一類的東西人們是看不到的，至少用肉眼是看不到的。”這項研究被發表在《環境科學與技術》雜志上。

Microplastics come from numerous sources. They can be pieces shed from larger plastics or they may have been designed small to begin with.

微塑料的來源眾多。它們可以是從較大的塑料上脫落下的碎片，也可以是一開始就被設計得很小的微粒。

For their study, Cox and his team pulled together past scientific literature that calculated the number of microplastics in things we commonly consume, such as in tap and bottled water, sugars, seafood—even in the air that we breathe.

在他們的研究中，考克斯和他的團隊查閱了過去的科學文獻，這些文獻計算了我們常接觸的物質中含有的微塑料數量，例如自來水、瓶裝水、糖、海鮮，甚至是我們呼吸的空氣。

This analysis helped them figure out the baseline amount of microplastics that people are consuming every year. They couldn’t include common foods like beef, poultry, vegetables and dairy in their analysis because data on them doesn’t exist yet. In fact, their study could only account for 15 percent of people’s caloric intake.

這項分析幫助他們計算出了人們每年吸收的微塑料的基準數量。他們的分析無法將牛肉，家禽、蔬菜和乳制品等常見食品納入其中，因為目前還沒有這些產品的有關數據。事實上，他們的研究只囊括了人體熱量攝入占比15%的物質。

Even missing the majority of what people swallow, the research revealed that—at the very least—humans appear to consume somewhere between 74,000 and 121,000 microplastic particles every year.

即使沒有考慮到人們攝入的大部分物質，研究顯示，人們每年至少攝入了7.4萬到12.1萬個微塑料顆粒。

That number goes up for people drinking bottled water rather than tap water. Now, is all this plastic ingestion safe? Scientists simply don’t know yet.

而且，對于飲用瓶裝水而非自來水的人來說，攝入量將更大。那么，將這么多塑料攝入體內是否安全?科學家們尚不清楚。

This is kind of the first estimate of dose, you could say, right? So if you’re thinking in terms of toxicology and ecotoxicology, dose is a very important factor to think about, and so this kind of presents the first estimate, but it is very much an underestimate because of what we don’t know.

你可以說，這只是對劑量的初步估計，對吧?因此，如果你從毒理學和生態毒理學的角度去考慮的話，劑量是一個非常重要的考慮因素，因此這只是初步估計，但是由于還有很多是我們不知道的，這個數字可能被嚴重低估了。

(全文共396個詞，科學美國人)

重難點詞匯：

malleable adj. 可鍛的;可塑的;有延展性的;易適應的

sesame n. 芝麻，胡麻;通行證

underestimate vt. 低估;看輕 n. 低估