Nanotechnology risks - where are we today?

Fadeel, an Associate Professor of Toxicology at the Karolinska Institute’s Division of Biochemical Toxicology, is first author of a review paper that summarizes the Stockholm Symposium (There’s plenty of room at the forum: Potential risks and safety assessment of engineered nanomaterials).

Fadeel’s review covers five major areas below:
Materials and methods: The importance of standardization
While a unified procedure to classify all nanomaterials and their applications seems unlikely, there is nevertheless an urgent need for answering some outstanding questions especially in connection to the biological effects of novel nanomaterials and the possible health and environmental problems they may cause. The two most obvious requirements concern the comparability of the methods used for monitoring of adverse effects and the materials that are subject to such investigations. Therefore, there is a need for standardized toxicological assays as well as reference materials to classify the measured effects and compare them with those from other laboratories in other countries.

Human studies of engineered nanoparticles: A comparison with air pollution
The researchers conclude that the hypothesis that systemic access of ultrafine insoluble particles may induce adverse reactions in the cardiovascular system, and other organs, leading to the onset of cardiovascular disease in human subjects, requires careful consideration. Moreover, other, not generally recognized routes of exposure to engineered nanomaterials, including the putative uptake of inhaled nanoparticles into the brain via the olfactory nerve also need to be considered, although the relevance of such clearance pathways for human exposure remains to be established.

Single-walled carbon nanotubes: Understanding and controlling their toxicity
Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) are some of the most researched nanoparticles. Their increasing use in industry has prompted a number of toxicology studies. The participants at the symposium discussed numerous studies that deal with some form of human health and biocompatibility of CNTs, especially single-walled CNTs.

Risk assessment of engineered nanomaterials:
The researchers pointed out that there is a strong likelihood that the biological activity of nanoparticles will depend on physico-chemical parameters not routinely considered in toxicity screening studies. One consequence of this would be that the regulation of human occupational exposures, which is currently based on airborne mass concentration, need to be reconsidered in light of these findings.

Regulation of the nanotechnologies: Identifying knowledge gaps
Several important ‘knowledge gaps’ were identified and discussed at the Nobel Forum minisymposium, and efforts to address these issues will be required to ensure science-based decision making and implementation of existing legislations: (i) nomenclature, definitions, and standards; (ii) hazard characterization; (iii) exposure and effects assessment; (iv) environmental fate, transport, and persistence; and (v) measurement, sampling, and monitoring of nanomaterials.

Source: Nanowerk.

Public meeting will re-examine future of artificial intelligence

For decades, scientists and writers have imagined a future with walking, talking robots that could do everything from cooking your eggs to enslaving your planet.

Trouble is, this fabled artificial intelligence has never happened.

But this weekend, more than 700 scientists and tech industry leaders will gather at San Francisco’s Palace of Fine Arts Theatre to plan for the day - still decades away - when computers start improving themselves without the approval of their former masters. Participants wonder whether this will yield the kindly Commander Data of “Star Trek: The Next Generation” fame or the mob of killer machines that attempted a world takeover in the movie “I, Robot.”

Source: San Francisco Chronicle.

The 11th Hour Time Capsule

Source: 11th Hour Action.

Study: US preparing ‘massive’ military attack against Iran

The United States has the capacity for and may be prepared to launch without warning a massive assault on Iranian uranium enrichment facilities, as well as government buildings and infrastructure, using long-range bombers and missiles, according to a new analysis.

Source: RAWStory.

Interview with Vernor Vinge

ActuSF : Your future isn’t hostile, but could appear a bit freaky for readers of today. Is there any state of emergency ?
Vernor Vinge : Unfortunately, I think we face many emergencies. The most serious threats come from cheap superweapons and the social and environmental problems that make the use of such weapons imaginable. On the positive side, we have hundreds of millions of people who are smart, of good nature, and communicating with one another. These people massively outnumber the crazy badguys. In fact, the broad reach of communicating humanity also outnumbers (and intellectually outmatches) the government leaders who play statist games. Furthermore, that broad reach of humanity is the fundamental powerhouse for the economies of all nations which aspire to prosperity or greatness. More and more, governments realize that whatever the laws, they need educated, creative, and relatively satisfied populations. Such populations make very good stewards of the future.

Interview with Vernor Vinge at ActuSF via BoingBoing.

U.S. professor advocate Ebola for culling 90% of global population

Today, to my dismay, I rediscovered this, a Dr. Pianka who publicly proposed the use of the airborne Ebola virus to kill off 90% of the human race. This man, a member of the Texas Academy of Science and chairman of its Environmental Science Section, received a standing ovation from students and Academy members when he gave a talk on the matter at the University of Texas at Arlington. As Eliezer Yudkowsky points out at Overcoming Bias, it’s silly to be “surprised” by something like this: given the professor’s knowledge set and lax sense of ethics, exterminating 90% of the human population with a flesh-eating virus must seem like a great solution to the planet’s problems, or he wouldn’t be talking about it in the first place.

Via Anissimov. Read the original article here.

Ex-Astronaut’s Lonely Mission: Save Earth From Asteroid Strike

Former astronaut Rusty Schweickart has already earned his place in the history books by going to the moon with the Apollo 9 mission. However, should an asteroid crash into the Earth anytime soon, killing millions and causing catastrophic damage, he’ll also be remembered as the guy whose warnings we ignored.

Source: Wired.

The Risk Governance of Nanotechnology: Recommendations for Managing a Global Issue

Short Description:
This document reports on the discussions undertaken at the Conference “The Risk Governance of Nanotechnology: Recommendations for Managing a Global Issue” held at the Swiss Re Centre for Global Dialogue on the 6th and 7th of July 2006. Stakeholders from industry, government, research and civil society gathered to give feedback on the International Risk Governance Council (IRGC)White Paper1 on Nanotechnology Risk Governance and to explore how its recommendations could be implemented.

From the “Summary of Frame Two NGO Workshop” presented by yours truly (page 49 of paper version, page 51 of PDF):

Military offence applications are particularly concerning because, unlike nuclear arms, verification difficulties mean there is no clear point at which opponents reach stability in the process of escalation and proliferation. Existing arms treaties may not apply to nanotechnology-based weapons, and there are important intellectual property, commercial confidentiality, and national security issues involved in addressing this challenge…

Finally, while current attention is focused on near-term concerns, questions raised by Frame Two nanotechnologies are more difficult, particularly with respect to fourth-generation, atomically-precise manufacturing of macroscale products. The risk governance process must move faster to address longer-term political, military, and civil liberties issues in time.

Source: Swiss Re via Nanowerk via Foresight.

Chinese nuclear sub shows up on Google Earth

Increasingly, tools readily available on the Internet enable independent specialists or even members of the general public to do intelligence work that used to be the monopoly of agencies like the CIA, KGB, or MI6. Playing the role of an armchair James Bond, Hans K. Kristensen, a nuclear weapons specialist at the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) in Washington, D.C., recently drew attention to images on Google Earth of Chinese sites. Kristensen believes that the pictures shed light on China’s deployment of its second-generation of nuclear weapons systems: one appears to be a new ballistic missile submarine [see above image]; others may capture the replacement of liquid-fueled rockets with solid-fuel rockets at sites in north-central China, within range of ICBM fields in southern Russia.

Source: IEEE Spectrum. An excellent example of how open source intelligence outsmart military intelligence.

See also: Nuclear terrorism: the new day after from the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. From the article:

Finally, there is the question of whether the U.S. government would behave with rational restraint. This, of course, assumes that there is a government. A terrorist nuclear attack on Washington could easily kill the president, vice president, much of Congress and the Supreme Court. But in a July 12 Washington Post op-ed, Norman Ornstein revealed that the federal government has refused to make contingency plans for its own nuclear decapitation, which means that U.S. nuclear weapons could be in the hands of small, enraged launch control teams with no clear line of authority above them. Assuming that the federal government was still there, however, we can only imagine (using the reaction to the loss of a mere two buildings on 9/11 as a metric of comparison) the public rage at the loss of a city and the intense, perhaps irresistible, pressure on the president to make someone, somewhere pay for this atrocity.

Originally posted on the Lifeboat blog.

ABC: The Last Days on Earth

Via Betterhumans.com