From the World Changing blog:

Nanotechnology and the Developing World: The Regulatory Gap

Brandon Keim

It's interesting how any variation on the words "straight to the brain" go, well, straight to the brain. So reports of this study caught many eyes last week:

To find out if the tiniest airborne particles pose a health risk, University of Rochester Medical Center scientists have shown that when rats breathe in nano-sized materials, the particles quickly follow an efficient path from the nose to several brain regions.

Nano-sized materials -- also called ultrafine particles and nanoparticles -- are 1-100 nanometers in diameter. A nanometer is 1 billionth of a meter; a sheet of paper is about 100,000 nanometers thick. [...]

In the study, the researchers saw changes in gene expression that could signal inflammation and a cellular stress response in the brain, but they do not yet know if a buildup of nanoparticles causes brain damage.

The nanoparticles tested came from manganese oxide, a compound found in welding fumes. The rats inhaled the particles at a levels equivalent to those breathed by welders. And while the researchers don't know exactly what the nanoparticle buildup could beyond reaching the rats' brains, welders do have unusually high rates of Parkinson's disease.

So what does this study mean, beyond being worrisome for welders? It's certainly not reason to pull the funding plug on any existing or anticipated nanotechnologies, but it does add to a fast-growing body of literature on the potentially damaging effects of some nanoparticles on human and environmental health.

Continue reading "Nanotechnology and the Developing World: The Regulatory Gap"

Responsive Architectures at Subtle Tech

Dawn Danby

When Subtle Technologies came back to Toronto this summer, it created another temporary safe zone between the divergent worlds of scientists and artists (layered with a heavy dose of academia). Architects show off the unbuilt and unbuildable, artists work with nanotech, and geneticists look at microscopic patterns in order to ponder fate.

This time around the focus was on Responsive Architectures - the way that natural and artificial structures change, adapt, and relate to one another. The very small structures of the cerebellum and the cell were there, along with large-scale wifi-enabled urban "sound gardens". The event kicked off with a workshop on new parametric modeling (3D) software. It seems that architecture, marinating in new technologies, now more than ever embodies what our Mr. Sterling once casually called the CAD-CAM baroque.

Although everything at Subtle Tech tastes a little bit of Near Near Future, I couldn't make the whole event this year. Still, some other very biased highlights include...

- Steven Vogel, who's written great books on practical biomimicry, did his keynote talk on plant mechanics: the way that poplar leaves, shark's bodies, and daffodils move through air and water... and the way we can apply these to buildings. After Vogel's talk, there was a fun exchange between him and Donald Ingber, lamenting how dangerously rare it is for architects and biologists to work together. Design can be "neobiological", they argued, and yet be nothing but inspired by living forms, enabled by expensive software - with no consideration or relevance to ecology or physics. "We're being a little concrete by feeling like we need to make everything look like cells.", Vogel insisted. "The future's nanotechnology will look as little like nature's nanotech as our computers look like brains."

Continue reading "Responsive Architectures at Subtle Tech"