> The tiniest of pieces of plastic, nanoplastics are defined by the researchers as having a diameter of less than one micrometre (one one-thousandth of a metre). Microplastics are between one micrometre and 5 millimetres across.
Isn’t a millimeter one one-thousandth of a meter and a micrometer one one-thousandth of that (or one-millionth of a meter)? I don’t have to reason about objects this small very often so I was trying to make sense of the relative sizes and this threw me off.
Of course mistakes happen, so whatever, hopefully it’s corrected shortly; I’m just surprised to see something so easily check-able as a unit definition get missed in a publication like Nature.
I had the same reaction, but then some cursory searching led me to this discussion on the "Talk" page for Wikiquote's entry on Mussolini which casts some doubt on the accuracy of the attribution and/or translation of this line:
> the various social programs the military has now been implementing
Social programs? You mean the policy of not discriminating based on gender or sexual preference?
> they started scrutinizing the basic, popular political beliefs of many of the recruits
It seems prudent to scrutinize political beliefs that might be incompatible with treating a non-cishet male colleague as an equal (or a superior, as the case may be) or regarding such colleagues with dignity and respect.
> The tiniest of pieces of plastic, nanoplastics are defined by the researchers as having a diameter of less than one micrometre (one one-thousandth of a metre). Microplastics are between one micrometre and 5 millimetres across.
Isn’t a millimeter one one-thousandth of a meter and a micrometer one one-thousandth of that (or one-millionth of a meter)? I don’t have to reason about objects this small very often so I was trying to make sense of the relative sizes and this threw me off.
Of course mistakes happen, so whatever, hopefully it’s corrected shortly; I’m just surprised to see something so easily check-able as a unit definition get missed in a publication like Nature.