Monday, March 29, 2004

Buckyballs are the new asbestos?


Buckyballs -- nanoscale new materials based on inspired by Buckminster Fuller's research geodesics -- are theoretically inert in the environment, seeking out other buckyballs and forming clumps that are too big to do any real harm. Turns out they're not -- a Southern Methodist U researcher who released buckyballs into an aquatic testbed found that they were deadly to micro- and macro-organisms.
Oberdoerster kept young largemouth bass in ten-liter aquariums filled with fullerene-spiked water at concentrations of 0.5 parts per million -- similar to that encountered with more common pollutants in U.S. ports. After 48 hours, the fish were removed and their brains studied for evidence of lipid peroxidation, a tissue-burning chemical reaction that toxicologists use as a standard of biological damage.

The level of brain damage was "severe," Oberdoerster reported yesterday at the national meeting of the American Chemical Society in Anaheim -- some 17 times higher than seen in fish kept in clean water for comparison.

Link (via /.)



posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:06:15 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

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