Nov 16, 2014

This Week in Nano: (Week 46: 10th Nov-16th Nov)

As the online world was reporting the Rosetta landing/mission and all the drama that went with it (#shirtgate) it was announced that the role of the chief scientific advisor was made defunct. Yes I know its not nano but it is important to European Science that Professor Anne Glover's position is no more. The gaurdian ran a report on it - it can be read here. Junker axes chef scientific advisor

Nov 9, 2014

This Week in Nano (Week 45: 3 November - 9th November)

Elsevier announced the publication of a new peer reviewed journal. Materials Today Communications. It will focus primary on research covering all areas of materials science. The editor is Tomas Martin of Oxford University (Atom Probe Group).
The Centre for BioNano Interactions (Dublin) group published 'Surfactant titration of nanoparticle protein corona' last week (paywalled). Where the protein stability and composition of the corona was evaluated over time. As corona characterisation is important in understanding the biological effects of nanomaterials this may be an interesting analytical tool for corona characterisation. 
I will leave you with this video from RiskBites '7 surprising facts about silver nanoparticles and health.

Nov 2, 2014

This Week in Nano (Week 44: 27th Oct - 2nd Nov)


A no nonsense article (at last!) entitled: Nanosafety Research—Are We on the Right Track? was published this week and is available open access here. The article highlights the ‘significant’ weaknesses of studies addressing possible for human toxicological end points of engineered nanomaterials. This quote will give you an idea of where the author is coming from: 

 ‘One of the most important outcomes of this literature study is the fact that most of the studies are not toxicological, but mechanistic studies, even though the authors discuss “toxicologically relevant” results! This aspect is very puzzling and confusing to the reader of such publications, because this is generally not pointed out. Moreover, the discussions on toxicological end points are very often misleading, as the experiments have been carried out with high concentrations or in a too high a dose range and so only provide mechanistic insights but are not useful for a toxicological assessment of the hazard.’

Google and Nanoparticles: The Life Science department of Google’s research/experimental facility (Google[x]) has discussed its interest in nanoparticles. See this link for the article and to hear the head of the Google[X] Life Science department Andrew Conrad talk about nano. In particular they are interested in using nanoparticles to detect cancer.

NanoResource: A virtual open access issue focusing on the toxicological impact of engineered nanomaterials was published via the Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications journal. It can be found here, it is available until 15th May 2015.