In a hospital in Larissa, Greece, a quiet but unsettling pattern has emerged from the lungs of a hundred patients: those carrying a cancer diagnosis also carry, in measurably greater quantities, the microscopic remnants of the plastic world they inhabit. Researchers cannot yet say whether these particles help bring disease into being or whether diseased lungs simply hold onto the world differently — but the question itself marks a threshold in how humanity must reckon with the materials it has made ubiquitous. The study adds another chapter to a growing recognition that the boundaries between