Scary stuff in our food supply?

[chickenslayer]

I've never been on the serious enviro bandwagon but this kind of thing worries me for the future.

"Gold nanoparticles built up in tobacco leaf tissue, and tobacco hornworms that ate the plants accumulated concentrations of the nanomaterials about 6 to 12 times higher than in the plant.

“We expected [nanoparticles] to accumulate, but not biomagnify like that,” said Bertsch, co-author of the Dec. 3 study in Environmental Science & Technology.

Predatory microbes in a separate study, published Dec. 19 in Nature Nanotechnology, also built up concentrated levels of cadmium selenide nanoparticles after eating smaller microbes that ingested them."


http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/20...sludge-safety/

[tinknal]

Sounds like science has returned to it's roots of Alchemy..........

[naturelover]

I wouldn't be too concerned about it. Keep in mind it was a deliberate experiment and the team added concentrated amounts of super-stable nanoparticles to the plants water to mimic consumer nanoparticles in wastewater sludge. The implication is that nanoparticles in wastewater sludge are concentrated and super-stable but I doubt that is true. Cadmium is toxic in high concentrations, that is true, but it isn't used in nanotechnology consumer products. Gold is not toxic, and neither are any of the other most common materials used in nanotechnology consumer products. These are all essential minerals that are in all foods and water and our bodies only use what they need and excrete the excess.

http://www.nanotechproject.org/inven...nalysis_draft/
..... there is a small set of materials explicitly referenced in nanotechnology consumer products. The most common material mentioned in the product descriptions is now silver (259 products). Carbon, which includes fullerenes, is the second most referenced (82), followed by zinc (including zinc oxide) (30), silica (35), titanium (including titanium dioxide) (50), and gold (27).

Now what I did find interesting was that the tobacco hornworms that ate the plants accumulated concentrations of the nanoparticles of gold 6 to 12 times higher than what was in the plant. If tobacco hornworms can cause nanoparticles of gold to multiply like that in their bodies then that opens up a whole new level of possibilities for the uses of tobacco hornworms. Kind of like a goose that lays a golden egg.

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