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Trapping Toxins Using Gold Nanoparticles
Billly Gates writes "British scientists have found a way to quickly and accurately find toxins by binding gold nanoparticles with sugar which then could be dissolved in a solution that changes color when any toxin is found. This procedure could be used in the medical field to find poisons and diseases as well as finding substances in bioterrorist attacks."
"First you get the sugar & gold nanoparticles, then you get the power, then you get the women".
*sighs*
Mention bioterrorism and you're guaranteed publicity and funding.
Meanwhile, the real bioterrorists are never going to be bought to justice.
My pics.
Why wouldnt this work with the existing micron sized gold particles?
welcome our new sound-money-containing overlords.
Nonaggression works!
Can't you get intoxicated by almost everything if the dose is high enough. This thing can't detect every toxin, right?
Why can't this invention be deemed notable for its own worth? News outlets continually drag some kind of terrorism into everything these days...
Suddenly, a new way to detect toxins isn't notable because it helps those with medical conditions, but rather because it hinders terrorists from achieving their goals... not that it isn't a good side effect or anything.
What's next? "New construction techniques defend against terrorist bombings"?
sounds like some elvish shit, setting up the mood in some snowy Brittania forest before the demons kill the unicorns....
Well, help prevent against catastrophic structural failure as in the Oklahoma City event and the WTC^H^H^H^H^H (*puts on tinfoil hat*) document possible methods of destroying these 'improved' buildings if the government wants to invade any new countries this year.
..blah blah lots of good medical reasons.. COCAIN AND ANTHRAX!!!!1!!1!1!!
Perhaps I've had a little too much coffee this morning!
On the other hand this sounds familiar to an article here a few weeks back which described a different method to detect
Maybe more media-folks are getting into the science stuff, or they've finally discovered a new source of money for research grants.
I do have to say, your soapbox points have a bit of merit, if slighly off topic.
What you have to understand is that, unlike you and your kin, the world's science community cannot focus on a single issue. We have hundreds of great minds and thousands of average ones studying many different problems at any given time. While some see fit to study ways to make GE'd crops sterile, others study ways to make similar GE'd crops yield 2x as much. You cannot say that either side is bad, both are looking out for their best intrests and may have consequences outside of their realm of influence. Such is the way of the world today.
We cannot stand still and expect the old ways of business to take care of tomorrows problems. The population of the world is growing. 6.5 billion today, 7 billion in a few years... 8 isn't too far away. You cannot claim that technology like this is bad if you can't see the big picture.
America is all about speed. Hot, nasty, badass speed. -Eleanor Roosevelt, 1936
500 years after alchemy became chemisty, and we can only turn gold into lead???
Apparently gold has been used to detect other things, too. It's a different procedure, but interesting none the less.
It changes color for "any toxin"? What exactly is a "toxin". As any toxicologist will tell you, poison is all about the dosage.
At 1000mg / dose, Tylenol is an effective, safe non-addictive pain releiver.
At 7000mg / dose, it causes irreversible liver damage in most adults without the antidote.
Poisoning by Iron supplements used to be a very common cause of poison deaths among children until there were mandated safety caps for iron supplements.
So again, what is a "toxin"?
SirWired
How the hell do you make a discovery like this???
Someone was walking around the office one day with a cup of sugar and tripped and spilled it into the vat of gold nanoparticles???
A spoon full of sugar (/w gold nanoparticles) helps the ricin go down? the ricin go down.. the ricin go down??
(Shameless theft of riff from and apologies to Mary Poppins)
I'm a fiscal conservative, it's a pity we don't have a political party anymore
This is eerily similar to what the horn of the unicorn is supposed to do in the presence of poisons.
...
Life imitates art and art imitates life, but which is it this time
Bear this in mind very carefully and don't forget it:
h ings-up-your-###
Terrorist == Anyone-we-want-you-to-fear-so-we-can-stick-more-t
Send your spendthrift head of state this
Disclaimer: I did not read the article However, they must have had some sort of theory to start with which made them even think of binding gold nanoparticles to sugar. Sometimes it's a lot easier to observe what happens in reality, and then piece together the steps that led up to the observed effect. You make it sound as if the scientists aren't planning on learning from what they've seen.
It's "Gold Particle" not "Gold NANOparticle". I'm sick of random addition of "nano" in front of words to make them sound new.
Well, since no one here seems to have mentioned how exactly these particles are made and the article is lackg in details, I'll fill you in. I work with metallic (platinum usually, but also a little with gold) nanoparticles on an almost daily basis. The synthesis is pretty straight forward. You take a metallic salt and dissolve it in an aqueous solution of some capping agent, in this case probably glucose (judging from the red color mentioned in the article -- I have made gold nanoparticles using glucose, and it does turn a deep red), and reduce it in the presence of sodium borohydride which leads to particle growth. Once this process is complete, the particles are suspended in solution by the glucose capping agent (like how soap "dissolves" dirt).
My guess is that the different colors mentioned are simply due to the interactions between the nanoparticles and the toxins. In the nanometer size region, particles no longer bend light -- they simply absorb it. So, when you change the size of the particle, you change the wavelength of light that it will absorb. A good example of this is cadmium selenide nanoparticles. I saw a quantum dot test kit with solutions of different size cadmium selenide nanoparticles. The colors ranged from orange to yellow-green, based *only* on the *size* of the particles in solution. So, I would guess that when you put the gold nanoparticles in the presence of another chemical that the new chemical starts to interact with the gold and changes the either the actual size of the particle or the "effective" size of the particle (meaning the size of the particle-capping agent complex). Either way, it would lead to a change such as the one described in the article.
Well, I hope that was informative.
A dupe with THIS article?
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
Gold is uniquely able to bond to many carbon-containing (a.k.a. organic) molecules, which is why it is used in these experiments. It is also easy to make small gold particles, on the nanoscale, which enables them to interact with other biological entities such as cells, viruses, and molecules such as toxins. What the article doesn't say is: the new thing here is pretty small. Sugar-toxin interaction. The gold isn't so important.
Actually, it's a pretty straightforward result. They took old work by Chad Mirkin and Coworkers (http://www.chem.northwestern.edu/~mkngrp/Group%20 Research.htm/), and the use of sugars to solubilize gold for therapeutic uses http://images.google.com/images?q=auranofin&hl=en& btnG=Search+Images/, then changed the receptors. Straightforward applied engineering from known principles and substances. It's only novel if you're a science journalist with space to fill who doesn't follow the chemical literature.
the more accurate the calculations became, the more the concepts tended to vanish into thin air. R. S. Mulliken
Apparently scientist have found a new way to spread the wealth.
This story is quite ironic... if you are a Cyberman.
But do they know why it happened? is there an undelying theory that can be applied to other materials? do we know why it works with gold? does it work with other substances? and if it does not, why?
Which legends are you reading. I though unicorn horns were supposed to be a cure for toxins, not a detector.
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
Why, a "toxin" is any vague, mysterious, ill-defined "bad thing" that whatever magic water, magnets, or pseudo-religious ritual-for-hire that the peddler is selling is supposed to make go away, of course.
Seriously, I think "toxin", "detoxify", and other variations of the word used outside of an actual poison-studying-scientist publication is pretty much an automatic sign that the writer/speaker/salesdrone is blowing smoke.
(In fairness, TFA actually IS about poison-studying-scientists though...)
The gold nanoparticles are just there as a non-reactive substance to stick any one of a variety of tailored sugar molecules which is known to react with a particular substance. The article doesn't look like it specifically says, but I assume what happens is that when the sugar reacts in the presence of whatever-bad-thing-you-want-to-detect, it dissolves off of the tiny gold particles, which then precipitate out of the solution so you can see them.
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
If this really worked, I wouldn't get a hangover after downing a bottle of Goldschlager, now would I???
That's what we have here. It's not ordinary sugar, it's a selected type of monosaccharide for each kind of target to be detected.
And what they don't say is that it's probable that there are many "toxins" for which no such marker exists. And that it's probable for one marker to react to more than one dissolved substance, possibly leading to false positives.
It's a cute trick, though, making the gold stay with the sugar in a solution. It'd be interesting to see how often it dissolves off before detecting anything, or how long it takes for it to dissolve off afterward.
I remember seeing a conference presentation from a group from Rice Univ. that had injected targeting gold-nanoparticles (for a type of cancer of the liver) into a rat; they then bombarded the rat with a specific red-wavelength red laser; the gold-nps generated so much heat, the rat's liver `caught on fire`. BTW, both AU and SI nps are highly toxic; in our lab we could get LD-50 in 24 hrs with only a small number of nps in tissue.
Isn't this a selling point for Goldschlager? :)