SAFENANO Community

Originally posted on 2020 Science, 25/8/09: Could using sunscreen lead to Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, or other neurodegenerative diseases?  The association seems far-fetched - given the amount of sunscreens, creams and lotions used every day, surely someone would noticed a link by now if it existed!  Yet a press release from the ...

From 2020 Science:I’m looking at an electron microscope image of a carbon nanotube - as I cannot show it here, you’ll have to imagine it.  It shows a long, straight, multi-walled carbon nanotube, around 100 nanometers wide and 10 micrometers long.  There is nothing particularly unusual about this.  What is unusual is that the ...

So you want to make or use carbon nanotubes, but you are worried about handling then safely.  What do you do?  The good news is that the UK Health and Safety Executive has just published an information sheet that addresses just this question.  Risk management of carbon nanotubes is (according to the blurb) “specifically about the ...

From 2020science.org:Introducing MINChar—a new community initiative to support effective material characterization in nanotoxicity studies. Here’s a tough one:  Imagine you have a new substance—call it substance X—and you run some tests to see how toxic it is.  But you’re not quite sure what substance X is. You know that it is a ...

From 2020science.org:The National Research Council of the National Academies releases its review of the National Nanotechnology Initiative Strategy for Nanotechnology-Related Environmental, Health, and Safety Research.  And it’s not pretty. Most people acknowledge that innovation is vital to economic and social prosperity.  But ...

From 2020science: Nanotechnology—like other emerging technologies—presents a dilemma:  If you're making new substances with uncertain health risks, how low is low enough when it comes to managing exposure? The issue is raised in the current edition of Nature Nanotechnology by Vladimir Murashov of the National Institute for Occupational ...

From 2020science.org:  First impressions of the ICON EHS Database Analysis Tool What do you do this holiday season when the turkey’s lost its appeal, you’ve seen every movie worth watching ten times over, and conversational déjà-vu sets in?  If you are really desperate, you could play “nano-trivia”—and thanks to the fine folks at ...

From 2020science.org:The Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution report on Novel Materials Imagine for one naïve moment that we have a pretty good handle on managing the environmental impact of existing manufactured “stuff”.  Then someone comes along and invents some “new stuff” that behaves very differently from the “old stuff.” How ...

From 2020science.org:UK Consumer Organization Which? Releases New Report Who needs an emerging technologies blog when you have The Daily Mail?  For those of you that missed it, Wednesday’s on-line issue of the British tabloid newspaper highlighted “The beauty creams with nanoparticles that could poison your body” I’m so glad someone’s ...

From 2020Science.org: Twelve months ago today I held a bag of multi-walled carbon nanotubes up before a hearing of the U.S. House Science Committee.  I wanted to emphasize the discrepancy between the current state of the science on carbon nanotubes, and a tendency to classify this substance as the relatively benign material graphite from ...