adomasm3

Recap on PFAS toxicity and can filters successfully remove both long and short-chain PFAS?

You are right - I am building a mental model along these lines:

a) compounds which induce a chemical reaction inside cells and as a result cause damage. Benzene, PFAS, phtalates, BPA etc are in this category. Size is less relevant but usually these are smaller and more reactive molecules.

b) small particulates, which are still probably much larger than those in group a). Thinking here microplastics, asbestos, PM10. These particulates are not necessarily super reactive with our cells, but they can cause problems through physical accumulation(?). So the question is: does the size of microplastic particles matter? Ie if I get 1K of 100 micron microplastic particles vs. 1K of 1 micron - does that alter my health risk?

great summary! I wrote a blog post focusing on DWR clothing, but ended up covering PFAS human and animal studies and concentration sampling. Overall with very similar conclusions: https://open.substack.com/pub/molecularspec/p/water-repellen...

However, if we are able to better detect them, we can build better remediation which we need.

The article briefly mentions exposure from touching (wearing) DWR clothing - appears to be 700x lower than washing.

thanks for the note. It used to say "to us" meaning us humans. PFAS is potentially also a danger to the other nature ecosystems.

exciting direction in this largely unexplored area. Empirically we have done a bunch of work with correlating mixtures of molecules to human perception at Volatile AI (https://volatile.ai) and the degrees of variation in mixtures are really wild - a tiny amount of something in a mixture can change the smell perception of the whole mixture. So getting decent results will be so much harder when looking beyond single molecules

not surprised - if we could decode smell, that being a very complex pattern of molecules, we can really unlock so much opportunity in healthcare and beyond. Dogs are of course the best of the best in this field! disclosure: I started Volatile AI (https://volatile.ai) to advance smell perception through hardware and AI