Posts tagged as:

asbestos

New carbon nanotube study raises the health impact stakes

by Andrew Maynard March 26, 2009

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 image also shows [...]

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A 2020 Science Taster

by Andrew Maynard February 19, 2009

Given the recent surge in 2020science readers (thanks to Lon S. Cohen at Mashable), I thought it about time I did a short retrospective—a taster for the type of stuff you can expect to read here.  So here are five pieces from the past year that cover everything from nanotechnology to synthetic biology, and ethics [...]

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Asbestos-like nanomaterials – should we be concerned?

by Andrew Maynard January 23, 2009

I’m afraid the “A” word just won’t go away.  It seems that every time people start thinking about the possible health effects of long, thin, fibrous nanomaterials, the question pops up “is this the next asbestos?”  You’d have thought that the issue would have been resolved by now—after all, nanomaterials like carbon nanotubes have been [...]

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Carbon nanotubes: the new asbestos? Not if we act fast.

by Andrew Maynard May 21, 2008

Mix carbon nanotubes and asbestos together (metaphorically) and you get an explosive mix—at least if news coverage of the latest publication coming out of Professor Ken Donaldson’s team is anything to go by.  The research—published on-line today in Nature Nanotechnology—is the first to explicitly test the hypothesis that long carbon nanotubes behave like long asbestos [...]

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