Buckyballs — nanoscale new materials based on inspired by Buckminster Fuller's research geodesics — are theoretically inert in the environment, seeking out other buckyballs and forming clumps that are too big to do any real harm. Turns out they're not — a Southern Methodist U researcher who released buckyballs into an aquatic testbed found that they were deadly to micro- and macro-organisms.
Oberdoerster kept young largemouth bass in ten-liter aquariums filled with fullerene-spiked water at concentrations of 0.5 parts per million — similar to that encountered with more common pollutants in U.S. ports. After 48 hours, the fish were removed and their brains studied for evidence of lipid peroxidation, a tissue-burning chemical reaction that toxicologists use as a standard of biological damage.
The level of brain damage was "severe," Oberdoerster reported yesterday at the national meeting of the American Chemical Society in Anaheim — some 17 times higher than seen in fish kept in clean water for comparison.
(via /.)
