Some scary thoughts.... http://www.coldtruth.com/ Shellfish absorb waste nanoparticles; scientists alarmed by potential environmental threat
Posted on June 27, 2009, 14:04, by schneider.
Here’s some cutting-edge research that could be frightening to those already worried about the safety of nanotechnology and that should give government regulators something to think about.
Nanogold rods Photo MIT
John Ferry and his colleagues in biochemistry, coastal environmental health and biomolecular research at the University of South Carolina have been studying what happens when nanomaterial – gold nanorods, in this case – get released into an ecosystem.
“Within the next five years the manufacture of large quantities of nanomaterials may lead to unintended contamination of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems,” the team wrote in the current issue of Nature Nanotechnology.
Nanotechnology is the science and application of the ultra-small. To try to give you an idea of size, 10 atoms are about one nanometer across, or a nanosecond is one billionth of a second.
“The environmental research community is trying to stay ahead of the curve on nanoparticles,” Ferry told me Friday in an email interview. He also predicted that when manufactured nanomaterials become a ubiquitous part of our economy, then they, or their waste products, will become ever-present parts of our environment.
The ecosystem created to test the movement of nanoparticles
As part of their research on how nanomaterial can infiltrate the environment, the Carolina scientists constructed laboratory ecosystems containing sea water, sediment, sea grass, snails, clams, shrimp and fish.
A small dose of gold nanorods was added and their distribution was monitored. The results, they said, suggest that gold nanorods can readily pass from the water to the marine food web.
“This is good and bad,” Ferry told me. “Good that we are alerted to the likelihood that filter feeders (snails, clams, shrimp and the like) will be good sentinel organisms for (detecting) nanoparticles; bad in that we also eat some of them.”
Gold nanorods are good particles on which to begin the research because of their growing popularity in commercial applications.
Earlier this month, researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology told a course I was attending that the use of gold nanorods as a cancer-fighting tool was expected to increase dramatically in the near future. They demonstrated the gold nanorods’ homing abilities, which makes them priceless for seeking, diagnosing and possibly treating tumors.
Ferry said he and the Carolina team are continuing to research other kinds of nanoparticles to see if they behave similarly and if there are other organisms out there that might be even better sentinels.
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