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Buckyballs Kill Fish
An anonymous reader writes "The Washington Post (free registration, not too invasive) has a disturbing article on a new study of the environmental dangers of nanotech. Buckyballs caused "severe" brain damage in largemouth bass when added to their aquariums in concentrations of 0.5 ppm, a concentration level on par with common US pollutants. They also caused die-offs of Daphnia, waterfleas that are a crucial part of the ocean food chain. "The new findings are somewhat surprising because many scientists had predicted that buckyballs would not linger in water but would quickly form clumps and sink." The findings have yet to be peer-reviewed."
A buckyball is a carbon molecule that has 60 atoms in it and is shaped like a soccer ball. Google for Buckminster Fuller for more information.
AND NO, it's NOTHING DIRTY!!!!! (for once)
Bucky balls are the roundest and most symmetricle large molecule known to man. They were name after the Architect R. Buckminister Fuller who made geodesic domes.
*nods* A buckminster fullerene molecule (which is the actual name for the substance, is a very nice piece of chemical engineering. It shape is much like a football and it is big enough to contain atoms or molecules in its interior.
And on the Eighth Day, Man created God.
Buckyball is a colloquial term for the Buckminster-Fullerene, a molecule of 60 carbon atoms in the shape of a soccer ball. It was names after Buckminster-Fuller, an architect of domes with a similar structure.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
"Any of various cagelike, hollow molecules composed of hexagonal and pentagonal groups of atoms, and especially those formed from carbon, that constitute the third form of carbon after diamond and graphite." dictionary.
In the dozen years since their discovery in 1985, the soccer-ball-shaped molecules of 60 or more carbon atoms now known as fullerenes have displayed a dazzling variety of tricks. Although real-world applications are still a way off, researchers have coaxed these "buckyballs" to become superconductors at low temperatures, emit light and carbon ion beams, and form many other compounds with different properties.
120 chars of filth!
Well, it's a third sort of pure carbon besides graphite and diamond. It has been discoverd just a few years ago, and the discovery of it has caused a complete new field (ever heared of carbon nanotubes?)
Also, it's AFAIK the largest object for which quantum interference has been shown yet.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
By the power of Google:
3 14 03-2004Mar28.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A
Enjoy!
Well, it's a third sort of pure carbon
It's allotropic form. And yes, I'm blatantly karma whoring.
"No beer until you finish your tequila!" -Leela's Dad
I didn't read the article myself, but instead went to google and searched for buckyballs. I didn't know anything about them before either, but I found this site to be particularly helpful. http://www.science.org.au/nova/024/024key.htm
The power of Christ compiles you.
A Random Blog
The formation of diamonds requires both heat AND pressure. Wired ran an article about artificial diamond production. The article mentions that the process requires a temperature of 2,200 F and a pressure of 50,000 atmospheres.
As long as that is true the fishes have little to worry about
What this does show is that buckyballs are not an inert substance.
The problem is that if it affects fish, it most likely affects animals higher up on the food chain (us).
Knowing this, we can not go washing buckyballs down the sink, where it will find its way into streams, rivers and lakes.
As bad as it is for the fish, if humans eat the contanimated fish, that could have bad biological repercussions (not unlike mercury).
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
When buckyballs "steal" electrons, the buckyballs are reduced and whatever lost the electrons is oxidized.
Whenever something is oxidized, something else is reduced and vice versa.
Things that are easily reduced are good oxidizing agents; things that are easily oxidized are good reducing agents.
Despite the name, oxidation does not necessarily (or usually) involve oxygen; it refers to the change in oxidation number, and the term is just a vestige of a time when chemistry was less well understood.
It doesn't rot your brain, but the effect is the same.
The Washington Post (free registration, not too invasive)
The problem I have with the Washington Post registration is that their cookies are coming from some other domain than washingtonpost.com.
I've noticed this because I can allow washingtonpost.com but it still tells me to turn on cookies and won't allow me to register.
Start here and Google onwards :-)
Using HTML in email is like putting sound effects on your phone calls. Just say <strong>no</strong>.
But AFAIK no brain damage from diamond has been reported
That's because diamonds don't get flushed down the drain, and if they did they would sink to the bottom of the lake and become part of the "muck".
If you Read The Fine Article, that's what the scientists thought would happen to the buckyballs. But in tests they remained suspended in the water and fish and small crustaceans became exposed and subsequently were affected.
There are a couple of other things to remember. Diamond is a crystalline form of carbon, which does make it inert, as other atoms are not attracted to form bonds with it. Buckyball molecules do not have this lattice structure, and are going to be more reactive. Here is a tutorail on the different aspects of carbon chemistry.
There are industrial processes that use diamond (like saws), and the resultant powder can be dangerous. But this is the case for any fine powder that might be inhaled, and the toxicity is going to be dependant upon the powder.
But generally, these are "microparticles", not "nanoparticles", which may react differently in a biological system. Being a magnitude smaller, they will by their nature tend to stay afloat longer. Rather than "clump together" and sink like other particles would.
Here is a study about diamond's biocompatibility.
Their conclusion - "Thus it appears that diamond is extremely -- indeed outstandingly -- biocompatible with living cells."
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Not salt water, they have nothign to do with the oceans ecosystem. I guess they just pulled protozoa form the air to get us whipped into a frenzy about. Did Jason Blair write this article?
Viruses are not self replicant machines/molecules. They just contain the information to create more virus. The information needs to be interpreted by an infected cell and its enzimes. Some advanced viruses also contain information to assemble enzimes needed for the other stages of the virus assembly. But the same applies: if they run out of cells to replicate, they can't continue.
A very different thing would be nanomachines who have the full ability to replicate themselves using only inorganic or simple organic molecules from the environment. A big chain reaction is there not only possible, but very probable.
I think that a good idea would be to make nanomachines which are not fully autoreplicant, but that rely on limited resources to replicate, such as other non-autoreplicate nanomachines or nanotools.
Lipids are a good portion of ALL tissue. Cell membranes are made primarilly of phospholipids (a nifty little molecule that forms walls due to its polar nature). Without lipids, there'd be nothing to hold your cells together, so you'd just be a puddle of cytoplasm (which would, like, suck).
So having buckyballs in your head, randomly destroying brain cell membranes would be a very bad th... Ooh! Look! A FISHY!!
> Buckballs are not molecular carbon. One would wonder the
> health problems induced by graphite pencils or diamonds!
You're wrong.
From here...
Fullerenes, or buckminsterfullerenes in full, are molecules composed entirely of carbon, taking the form of a hollow sphere, ellipsoid, tube or ring.
Fullerenes are similar in structure to graphite, which is composed of a sheet of linked hexagonal rings, but they contain pentagonal (or sometimes heptagonal) rings that prevent the sheet from being planar. They are sometimes jocularly called buckyballs or buckytubes, depending on the shape.
That's mighty light mice you've got there...
Remember that 0.5mg is 0.0005g is 0.0000005kg, and mice probably weight in the range of 5-10g. So you seem to have an error of 3 decimal places, it's a bit under 0.01% of body weight that the mice inhaled, not 1%...
Well, the structure and shape of things at these scales sometimes has an effect. Any one of a thousand possibilities. [diatomaceous earth] ... nothing really poisonous about the substance chemically, but the nanoscale fractured edges will cut into the insects and draw out moisture, killing them. ... an example of how the shape or structure of something can change its effect.
Another example: say you had a thousand lumps of metal. If you form them into cubes and throw them on the ground, they can be walked over relatively easily. If you form them into balls, it may be difficult to walk over them without stumbling. If you form them into caltrops, walking on them will cause injury. These properties are all independent of the raw effect of the metal itself.
Good points. Another example:
Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathy (Mad Cow, CJD, etc.) is caused by deformed proteins (according to the prevailing, although hotly debated, "prion" theory).
Chemically, prions are "just proteins" -- but structurally, they're fucked up in some way which spreads the deformation to adjacent normal proteins.
-kgj
-kgj
OP comes from New Scientist, picked up by the Washington Post.
Check it out w/o registering:http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99
yeah it should have said buckyballs are not the only form of molecular carbon which is why I bring up graphite and diamonds. I should not post before I have had coffee.
I make my face look like this and concerned words come out.
There are some more details here on the mecahnism of the buckyball action.
9 99 94825
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns
They found it to be moderately toxic, and to cause damage known as lipid peroxidation. This can impair the normal functioning of cell membranes and has been linked to illnesses such as Alzheimer's disease in humans. They also referred to other studies of both fullerenes and nanotubes causing lung damage.
Suppose you reduce the buckyball to the minimal number of C atoms, 1. You'd then get things like CO2, CH4, CH3OH, etc. None of these is biologically inert, though some are more active than others.
Or don't go to such an extreme. Reduce the BB to just a single C ring, say to one of the 6 C atom. If each takes on one water molecule, you get an H and an OH attached to each atom. This is a form of glucose, which is also biologically active.
If you take a piece of a BB that is one hex ring and an adjacent penta ring, and attach simple radicals to the dangling bonds, you get all sorts of interesting molecules, most of which are biologically active.
In general, clumps of C atoms smaller than a buckyball are rarely biologically inert. They have dangling or unstable bonds that interact with nearby molecules.
If you want to convert fullerenes to an inactive form, you need to make them much larger. Then they start to look locally like graphite. But graphite, while stable, isn't inert. Google for "graphite" and "catalyst", and you'll learn a lot about the subject. Graphite is a very common industrial catalyst, with small amounts of various atoms or small molecules attached to the C atoms.
One way I've seen this explained for non-physicists is to notice that in all these multi-carbon forms, each 6-C ring has three single and three double bonds. A double bond is less stable than a single bond (and a triple bond even less stable). So the C atoms on each end of a double bond are likely to break one of those bonds, and bond instead to passing atoms or molecules. Often the difference in bond strength isn't large, so it's easy for other passing molecules to steal away the attached clump of atoms, and the C then reverts to the double bond.
This is a "biochemistry for dummies" explanation of how carbon takes part in such a huge range of chemical reactions. But it gets across the idea that, when you see a ring of carbon atoms with a few double bonds, you are looking at a diagram of a molecule that is likely to interact with many other molecules in its vicinity. The underlying C ring will probably be fairly stable, but it has excess electron bonds that want to connect to something.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
I guess you never went fishing. Quickest way to kill a fish is to take a stick and smash his head. The cranium folds inwards if you do it right, instant death.
IIRC Elmer Fudd talked with a lisp.
Porky Pig was the one with the stutter.
and the second says:
Which answers your question. Strange as it may be to think that scientists who study toxicity would have an understanding of its relative nature which rivals even your own.