The nanomaterials revolution has made exceedingly tiny engineered particles a hot commodity, used in products from clothing to sunscreen to electronics. But the very properties that make them so useful -- vanishingly small size and high surface area—may have unintended consequences as they enter living organisms and the environment.
For many years two companies located in Bizkaia, Bilbao Chemicals (Barakaldo 1947-1987) and Nexana (Erandio 1952-1982), had been manufacturing lindane and dumping it into the environment with no control whatsoever. Today we have become aware of the need to solve the problems caused by this dumping and the difficulty in achieving this since there is no viable process that will safely destroy the lindane mixed with the soil.
Over the last few years, the use of nanomaterials for water treatment, food packaging, pesticides, cosmetics and other industries has increased. For example, farmers have used silver nanoparticles as a pesticide because of their capability to suppress the growth of harmful organisms.
Researchers from Brown University have shown how tiny graphene microsheets — ultra-thin materials with a number of commercial applications — could be big trouble for human cells.
Ingestion of commonly encountered nanoparticles at typical environmental levels is unlikely to cause overt toxicity, according to US researchers. Nevertheless there is insufficient evidence to determine whether chronic exposures could lead to subtle alterations in intestinal immune function, protein profiles, or microbial balance.
Xylem Inc., a leading global water technology company focused on addressing the world’s most challenging water issues, congratulates Anirudh Jain of Portland, Oregon on his selection as the 2013 winner of the United States Stockholm Junior Water Prize (SJWP) – the world’s most prestigious youth award for water-related science and technology projects.
BASF has participated in a research project by BMBF (German Federal Ministry of Education and Research) about the safety effects of nanoparticles. The results of the project will allow faster and easier evaluation of nan...
Professor Dr M. N. V. Ravi Kumar and Dr Dimitrios Lamprou, of the Strathclyde Institute of Pharmacy and Biomedical Sciences, believe an advanced form of atomic force microscopy, known as PeakForce QNM, could boost developments in the field of nanomedicines, the encapsulation of potent drugs in tiny particles measuring billionths of a meter in diameter. They described how this detailed imaging approach may also help scientists address growing concerns in the medical world around "nanotoxicology", the build-up of microscopic particles in people's tissues.
For the first time, researchers from institutions around the country have conducted an identical series of toxicology tests evaluating lung-related health impacts associated with widely used engineered nanomaterials (ENMs).
A Multidisciplinary team at Trinity College Dublin from the School of Medicine and CRANN, the Science Foundation Ireland funded nanoscience institute, has developed a new screening approach to test the safety of nanomaterials and their effects on human cells.
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