Travelling With Nanoparticles

In the world of consumer and related products the research and effort into new and more powerful goods is a great deal greater than that into the possible effects and consequences of their use.


Nanoparticles have been discussed before and their use is now widespread in so many household and personal products that very few people can avoid them or even discover if they are in use. They are assumed to be necessary and a good thing. That is good because they help the hype of marketing.

One study recently titled “Nanoparticles Used as Additives in Diesel Fuels Can Travel from Lungs to Liver” from Marshall University has found that the additive cerium oxide used to increase the efficiency of diesel fuels can make its way into the liver from the lungs and with toxic effect.

The nature and functioning of the toxicity needs further study. The full article is here:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/11/111117141157.htm

We know from the information available that basic products are now highly complex with a wide range of varied chemicals, largely synthetic, for the uses for which they are designed. We do not know the extent to which they impact on our bodies.

As anyone who has travelled by road does know, there are a lot of trucks and other vehicles that use diesel about and so a lot of nanoparticles being pumped out of the exhausts to go where they will.

If this form of pollution has toxic effects what other toxic delights do we get?

Fishy Business

The article in the link below relates to something that many people have suspected. It is that if a new technique is discovered and applied to too many things too quickly then what can happen can be unpredictable. This is about nanoparticles and their impact on the brains of fish.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/09/110919074256.htm

This might seem a distance away from humans but we do not know that. We do know that it is possible to take out and examine a large number of fish brains but as we cannot do that easily with humans exact comparisons are difficult.

At the moment it is becoming evident that many humans urged on the makers and those who market them are effectively sandblasting their bodies and to some extent their brains with a wide array of chemicals.

A number of those already give cause for disquiet about their long terms effects. But as more and more are subject to nanotechnology to increase impact from reduced quantities of active substances then the effect is likely greater. The cost advantages are one reason for this.

As my two theses are firstly that anything that goes up the nose can affect the brain and that the blood circulates there are problems. One is that the makers deny that the first can be proven and the second that the blood might circulate but the substances they use by some miracle of science do not to any effect.

We shall see but it will not be a happy business.

Just A Tickle In The Chest

Another article from a couple of years back which raises questions about the hell for leather application of new science to commercial products and the implications. In the meantime our leading scientists are trying to tell us it is all in the mind.

Much as coal miners used to be told that their chest problems were their own fault.

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Carbon nanotubes behave like asbestos

By Richard Van Noorden - 20 May 2008

Long straight carbon nanotubes may be as dangerous as asbestos fibres, potentially causing cancer in cells lining the lung, a pilot study in mice has shown.

Toxicologists say that those manufacturing and disposing of nanotubes - produced in thousands of tonnes per year worldwide - are most likely to be at risk of an asbestos-like illness, though it's not yet known if workers could be harmed just by inhaling nanotubes at typical exposures. '

We need more research on the toxicology of these materials, and the exposure to them in workplaces,' says Ken Donaldson, who led the research at the University of Edinburgh, UK.

Donaldson's team injected multiwalled carbon nanotubes and asbestos fibres between the membranes lining the lungs and abdominal organs in mice. They found that long straight nanotubes caused inflammation and lesions in membrane cells of the sort that have been shown to lead to cancer - just like asbestos fibres.

The problem, Donaldson explains, is that macrophages, cells which usually swallow up invading objects, can't stretch to engulf fibres that reach beyond about 20 micrometres. Such 'frustrated phagocytosis' leads to inflammation and eventually tumours.

'Anything that's thin, long, and doesn't easily dissolve in body fluids has got to come under suspicion as behaving like asbestos,' Donaldson says.

Nanotubes under twenty micrometres, and long nanotubes which were tangled up into balls, did not cause asbestos-like problems, the researchers found - although the study was not set up to investigate any other potential toxic effects of nanotubes.

'Much more work will be required to provide definitive proof [of whether particular types of nanotubes behave like asbestos fibres], and to show if the same effects are seen if particles are inhaled, and whether exposure levels reach the threshold for the development of cancer,' comments Mike Horton, director of life sciences at the London Centre for Nanotechnology, UK.

But given the terrible effects of asbestos that emerged in the 1960s, researchers are urging caution. 'Those tubes that resemble asbestos should be treated as though they were asbestos and regulated accordingly.

In this way, workers involved in their manufacture, use and ultimate disposal will be protected,' says Anthony Seaton, a chest physician who annoyed nanoparticle manufacturers by linking carbon nanotubes and asbestos fibres two years ago.

Tough enough

But nanotube manufacturers are unconvinced that the study means that stricter health and safety precautions are needed.

Del Stark, the CEO of the European nanotechnology trade alliance (Enta), says companies making nanotubes already take the strictest possible safety precautions, so it's hard to see how the research will change manufacturing practice.

Steffi Friedrichs, director of the UK's Nanotechnology Industries Association says that it is not surprising that long insoluble fibres of any material should behave in this way - glass wool has similar effects. Nanotube makers already take measures to minimise exposure, Friedrichs points out.

'We welcome the study - it gives us a very good insight into the potential problems of some types of carbon nanotubes,' she adds. 'But the study needs to be verified, and the researchers have noted important caveats - for example whether nanotubes can actually get to the place in the body that's going to cause damage.'

It's unlikely that those using nanotube products right now (such as lightweight composites in sports equipment) will be in danger of breathing in dangerous doses of free nanotubes, but researchers agreed they would have to demonstrate, rather than assume, low public exposure. '

Even if you took a mallet and hammered a tennis racket, there's probably no danger because the nanotubes are held in a polymer matrix. So if it turns out there's no long fibres for the public to be exposed to - that's great,' says Donaldson.

Aside from the need for more health and safety research, the study flags up that not much is known about exactly what types of carbon nanotubes are used in commercial products, says co-author Andrew Maynard, chief science adviser with the US-based Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies. '

There are voluntary agreements for reporting in the UK and the US that not too many companies have signed up to,' he says, warning that the nanotube market might suffer if the public lost trust in the technology because of the stigma of asbestos and because of a lack of transparency. '

It is up to governments to give industry as much guidance as possible,' he adds.

http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/News/2008/May/20050802.asp

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Take a deep breath…………

Know Your Enemy

This is a long and difficult article, but you should try your best. For me the punch below the belt comes towards the end. This science is done for Unilever and is of special purpose for shampoo’s and conditioner’s. The essential meaning is that the impact and force of future product development is to be much greater than it has become in the last five or so years. If it is bad now how much worse will it be in the foreseeable future. Is anyone researching the health implications? Unlikely, that aspect does not give “added value”.

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Viscosity at the Nanoscale: Intriguing 50-Year-Old Puzzle Solved

Science Daily, 25 June 2010

At a snail's pace, this is how proteins should move inside living cells where viscosity of environment exceeds the viscosity of water by a million times. However, proteins move not much slower than in water.

While looking for a solution to this puzzle, scientists from the Institute of Physical Chemistry of the Polish Academy of Sciences discovered a new principle of physics.

Why do biological processes occur in a nucleus? It is so overcrowded by macromolecules, so viscous, that proteins should move extremely slowly there. Under such conditions the pace at which proteins aggregate into complexes and at which molecules join DNA chains cannot be effective.

"But we know that proteins in living cells move several hundred thousand faster than they should. We managed to discover why this is so," says Prof. Robert Hołyst from the Institute of Physical Chemistry of the PAS (IPC PAS).

Human senses do not allow us to identify changes in viscosity well. The viscosity of rape oil seems to be relatively similar to the viscosity of water, though the latter is 400 times lower. Consequently, we often confuse viscosity and density. For example, shampoo comprises 95% of water and has similar density but due to its high viscosity it spills over a hand slowly. Honey is also viscous, not dense.

Viscosity appeared as a parameter in physics in the Navier-Stokes equations discovered in the 19th century. They describe river flow and air flow around plane wings correctly. According to this description, viscosity is not dependent on scale and should produce the same results in the case of a flying airplane and a protein particle moving inside a nucleus.

However, measurements show something different. As early as in the 1950s, experiments, conducted in ultracentrifuges and concerning sedimentation of small particles at high load factors, revealed a surprising fact. It turned out that objects several billion times smaller can feel viscosity several thousand and even hundred thousand lower than a macroscopic object.

A reason of such a dramatic change in viscosity could not be found for a long time.
Although viscosity was already examined by Newton, it has remained a mysterious property of nature to date. We understand its origin in gases: when two layers of gas move against each other, a molecule may jump from one layer to the other, there are collisions and the motion slows down.

However, when gas becomes dense and turns into liquid, there are interactions between molecules and it is hard to indicate phenomena that are directly responsible for the origin of viscosity. As a result, scientists are still examining viscosity in the simplest real fluids made of atoms of argon and other noble gases.

A group of researchers from the Institute of Physical Chemistry of the PAS, under the direction of Prof. Hołyst, has shown recently that in each hydrodynamic system there is a fundamental length scale at which there is a transition from macroviscosity to nanoviscosity. The size of this scale depends on the size of objects present in the fluid: in the case of polymers it will be the size of a random coil, and in the suspension of viruses, the length of a virus rod.

"If the size of a polymer coil is 10 nanometres, each object bigger than the coil, immersed in the polymer solution will feel macroscopic viscosity, and every smaller one, nanoviscosity," explains Prof. Hołyst. It is particularly interesting that changes in viscosity are exponential in length, which means that near the fundamental length scale they are very sharp.

The decrease of the size of a floating object may result in the change of viscosity by as much as 5-6 orders of magnitude. The discovery of the researchers from the IPC PAS means that the existing hydrodynamic equations in which the parameter of viscosity is constant will have to be reformulated in future.

The measurements were conducted as part of the research project with the use of the newest methods and equipment such as a confocal microscope with Fluorescence Correlation Spectroscopy. This new research technique allows the behaviour of individual protein molecules in liquids with capacity of cubical micrometers to be watched in the laser focus.

The experiments were carried out for six years; for two years they were sponsored by the British concern Unilever, interested in the application of the results in the creation of new shampoos and conditioners.

From the scientific point of view, research on nanoviscosity is of fundamental importance since nanoviscosity influences the rate of diffusion and limits the speed of biochemical reactions inside living cells. "

It is not incidental that proteins in a cell, usually the small ones, create complexes only in the vicinity of a place where the biochemical reaction is to proceed. This is necessary since a large complex would move million times slower than each protein separately," explains Prof. Hołyst.

Scientists hope that their discovery will be used by industry, where viscosity plays a key role in many biotechnological reactions. Producers of shampoos and cosmetics will certainly benefit from the results.

The new principle of physics will also be important for the construction of nanodevices. "Science still hardly understands phenomena occurring at such a small scale. If we want to build nanomachines, we should learn as much as possible about phenomena typical for the world in which they are to work," concludes Prof. Hołyst.

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Something Nasty In The Drains

Did you enjoy your nanoparticles for breakfast? Did the others in your toothpaste whiten your teeth to your satisfaction? Did those in your fabric conditioner transfer easily and permanently to everything you sat on? Are those in the clothes pegged out on the line now floating free at least 100 metres away as they are intended to? And are all those up your nose blocking all the smells of the world?

In the first case it could be the flavourings and the flavour enhancers such as MSG. In the second we are looking at titanium dioxide. The third could be benzene or cyanide based aromatics, the fourth fabric conditioners and the fifth anything that claims to “get rid of smells” or more accurately getting rid of your sense of smell.

An interested party who likes to check out the patent submissions submitted by various companies for their personal and household products tells me that recently it has been common to reduce the particle size of the ingredients to allow substantial increases in their surface areas.

This allows much bigger impact from smaller quantities and greater penetration. When AllergyUK endorse products on the grounds that allergens etc. have been reduced they are not aware that in fact they could be helping to market products that are hugely more powerful and for those vulnerable, a great deal more toxic.

As science in the UK is devoted now to “added value” there is nobody here to look at the issues independently. Elsewhere some are able to in the name of science. At Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering have done some work on Titanium Dioxide which is widely used in a great variety of products. The research was funded by the National Science Foundation of the USA and CEINT.

Their estimate is that whilst in 2002 the use of nanoparticles of this product was negligible by 2009 the level was 2.5% and is expected to rise to 10% by 2012 and assuming rapid expansion then by 2025 could be 2.5 million metric tons. They go on to say:

"Knowing the amount of this material is important because the more of it we make, the more likely it is to enter the environment and come into contact with humans with unknown consequences," said Mark Wiesner, professor of civil and environmental engineering and senior member of the research team. He also directs the federally funded Center for the Environmental Implications of NanoTechnology (CEINT), which is based at Duke.

We do not have a good handle on how much is out there, and even less about what that might mean," he continued. "Finding an upper limit on the potential for exposure is the critical first step in assessing risk. Even if these nanoparticles are toxic, a low exposure to them may limit the risk.

We just don't know yet. I like to use the example of sharks. Everyone knows they're dangerous, but not if you spend your entire life in Nebraska.

Now that the researchers have a better idea how much of this nanomaterial could be produced in the coming years, they plan to focus on specific types of products.

We want to get a better idea of where in the process these nanoparticles might be released into the air, water or soil," Robichaud said. "It could be during mining, during the production of the nanoparticles, production of the specific product using the nanoparticles, the use of the product, or its ultimate disposal."

There is no doubt that nanotechnology has valuable and desirable attributes in many fields, notably particular areas of medicine and engineering and much to offer in the future. But stuffing an increasingly wide range of exceptionally powerful chemicals designed to have a major impact on body and brain into many food products, into routine household and personal cosmetic products, and into fragrances actually designed to impact on the general environment is taking huge risks.

No wonder the bees cannot find their way home and the fish are changing sex. But there is one certainty; that is the UK government will do everything in its power to defend the shareholder value of the companies concerned whatever the casualty rate might be.