Next Time Your Mom Says Don't Go Out in The Rain, Spray Yourself With This
npr.org
npr.org
So after you have been primed about the subject, what is preventing their wide spread usage? Durability. Not a single one of them is able to sustain mechanical duress. And one of the most widely used chemical is Teflon, which is expensive. Hence, reapplication is not possible time and again. Many researchers are working on it, but a solution remains elusive until now. These sprays are nice such that they open the field, but much more still needs to be done in this field, since these sprays have been in market for at least 5 years now.
This is basically something made with particles that are much smaller than your cells. The material can probably get into your body by osmosis alone. Will the materials affect your body? Cause cancer? Get stuck in your lungs? Do something else that we don't know? There has been very little research on this area, and the little research that has been done is worrying. Putting this in consumer products is a very large and uncontrolled experiment.
We should be careful of starting to use materials like these with no further study or testing. There is a risk we might end up looking like the guys who brushed their teeth with radium or used a portable x-ray video machine to examine their kids' feet at the shoe store.
reference?
Except there's no real evidence this ever hurt anyone?
And xrays are an incredible medical marvel that has saved millions of lives.
Fear hurts more than it ever helps, if they had delayed xrays for even a few years imagine how many more deaths there would have been.
The precautionary principle is a dangerous idea that has somehow has gotten mainstream acceptance. It regularly kills people, people somehow think it's a safe concept when it's not.
Consequently, using this material to avoid getting your boots soaked and freezing to death on a mountain might be worth the risk, but using it on your coat isn't.
The truth is that, indeed, we don't know the health risks. Fear has saved more lives than taken, I suspect.
xrays could have given cancer to the people conducting the treatments. Using fear, xrays should have never been used for anything.
Is it worth the risk that doctors using xrays might get cancer to save some patients?
Is it worth the risk of giving a patient cancer just because they might have a 10% chance of a life threatening injury.
If you look at all clichéd stuffups with technology their kill rates are tiny, often like DDT they saved many many lives.
Now take all the things people get scared of - TV, Mobile phones, electricity towers, chemicals(What ever this means).
Mobile phones perhaps should only be used for emergencies in case they are cancer causing. Imaging how many 3rd world people would die if we made the decision.
But there is a NIMBY-like concern here: I don't want to be in the early adopter group of a technology like this unless my life depends on it. Others are free to go ahead as they choose, and it is nice if this quickly reveals the picture of danger and helps create beneficial technology. But I won't be on the bleeding edge of this development.
I guess my point is that there is a middle ground between jumping in headfirst (radium on your teeth, nano-coating on your cutlery) and being excessively careful and always covering your ass (contemporary life-saving experimental medical treatments).
According to Wikipedia, "monitoring of American salespersons found dose rates at pelvis height of up to 95 R/week, with an average of 7.1 R/week. (Up to ~50 mSv/yr, avg ~3.7 mSv/yr effective dose) A 2007 paper suggested that even higher doses of 0.5 Sv/yr were plausible." There were a number of cases affecting salespeople that were linked to the use of shoe-fitting fluoroscopes.
OP was criticizing irresponsible use of X-rays, not dismissing X-rays altogether. Given what we know about X-rays today, shoestore fluoroscopes seem an incredibly bad idea in hindsight. And given what we know about nanoparticles today, this nanotech seems like an incredible bad idea right now. Not bad enough to ban, but bad enough to regulate.
I'm sure the safety standards at a shoe store were less than robust.
Nearly everything we come into contact with during the day is made from particles smaller than our cells...
How about bleach? Sand? Dirt? Soap? Lotion? Bug spray? Makeup? Our skin is a pretty good barrier. Not saying that this stuff is safe, of course, but I don't think you can say it's unsafe because it's made of molecules that are small.
The idea being the particles have to be small enough to diffuse across the cell membrane to be a concern. Something half the size of a cell is going to have a very hard time permeating a cell membrane.
That send, another commenter (far more knowledgable on the topic than I) above points out that these aren't actually nano-scale particles. They are roughly on the same scale as a cell, and thus your point may hold in this context.
... maybe it is time to say goodbye to HN after all.
See http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=carbon-nano... for evidence that carbon nanotubes duplicate the dangers of asbestos. And the duplication is by mechanical means - so a large collection of machines around the same size is likely to cause similar effects on our lungs.
An interesting consideration: testing potentially harmful products on the public is done with many technologies. I am guessing the public benefits from this often enough to justify continuing the practice. Compare this "easier to ask for forgiveness than permission" style to the public utility lost by performing rigorous governmental approval and costly testing of the likes that pharmaceutics pass through before market entry.
Firstly, as a technical nitpick, osmosis by definition is the diffusion of water across semi-permeable membranes. Stuff that is not water cannot move by osmosis. What you are worried about is stuff like the coating being able to just diffuse through your skin.
That said, having trawled through the companies literature [1], they actually only claim micron scale particles. For reference, your cells are typically 70-100 microns in diameter, so these particles are still comparatively huge. They are likely larger than most bacteria you will see.
Furthermore, since they are both hydro and fat phobic, they'd almost certainly have a very hard time diffusing your your skin, since your live cells have membranes made of (basically) fat, and then enclose a space that is mostly water.
[1] http://www.spillcontainment.com/sites/default/files/FDA%20an...
I confess to knowing absolutely zero about it, but I also think the possibilities are fascinating, and worthy of both tremendous skepticism and awe at the same time.
From dictionary.com: " the tendency of a fluid, usually water, to pass through a semipermeable membrane into a solution where the solvent concentration is higher, thus equalizing the concentrations of materials on either side of the membrane." (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/osmosis?s=t)
Wouldn't that include solvents other than water?
Correction: only water can get into a cell through osmosis; the term you're looking for is actually passive transport.
Apart from semantics, nanoparticles are known to cause serious health problems. Asbestos fibers, which are very thin and on the same scale as the nanosilicate shown here, have been all over the news for causing cancer due to disruption of normal cell activity. Fiberglass, which is insulation made of very thin silica fibers, can cause lung problems.
Although I do think nanotechnology can have some benevolent effects in the future (think about this: what if tiny, very tiny nano-cells entered the bloodstream, and attached onto cancerous cells and killed them? The possibilities are so vast) the tech just isn't there yet in terms of health safety.
gold nanoparticles and carbon nanotubes are materials known as being very active and toxic in certain living systems, and the sort of thing that you describe as having very little research.
metal oxide nanoparticles (entirely likely in a superhydrophobic/oleophobic product) on the other hand, we have ample, ample research on, because volcanoes have been spewing them out of millions of years and we've been breathing them in.
I think I know the answer but it still makes a big difference.
Car window treatment. Basically you won't really need wipers anymore.
Glasses. Basically you won't need to clean them ever, except to rinse them using water to get dust out.
I won't go with cellphone screens because that has the risk of ingestion. But monitors yes.
a coating on shoes and worker's gloves. Cement mixers.
Coating millions of cars, computer monitors and clothes means hundreds of gallons of this solution being applied in warehouses all over the country. Disposal alone is a huge concern. What happens when it is time to throw away those boots? What happens when there's an accident and suddenly all of this stuff is now connected to bits of glass on the highway?
Hell, what happens when a truck carrying this stuff gets in a collision and suddenly a few thousand gallons of it is spilling down a city street?
It's a really cool demo but it makes me think of the times we used to spray swimming holes with DDT or build houses with asbestos... I feel it'll be a few years after mass production then we'll have the next big "Radium Girls" story.
Never having to clean the toilet again in itself would be amazing. Cost reductions in business here alone is significant.
Anti graffiti capabilities would make it huge for government applications. On park benches etc keeping communal equipment from ageing. The whole cleaning industry could be changed.
Waterproofing electronics.
Hygiene in hospitals might save many, many lives.
I do like living in the future.
As you said, it may all be hype- but if it delivers, I suspect that the company making it (UltraTech?) is going to have a nice few years ahead of it :)
The More You Know!
By making it obsolete maybe. Sounds like unemployment.
Or maybe as you suggest it will create a completly new market. It depends entirely on the ability of these companies to move forward.
http://www.spillcontainment.com/sites/default/files/FDA%20an...
It looks like it is fumed silica in carrier solvent with polyurethane adhesive. The fumed silica is branded "Aerosil", and made by Evonik:
https://www.aerosil.com/product/aerosil/en/products/hydropho...
Interestingly, it looks like Avon has a patent that covers applying hydrophobic Aerosil to keratin fibers (hair):
I see. They've patented the waterproof dog. ;)
No need for barns, they can't get wet
Also, how many construction workers are concerned with keeping their work boots and gloves free of dirt stains? lol.
Many actually, especially toward the completion of projects when interior decorations are starting to be installed and the architect/owner/designer may demand removal of boots to prevent workers from tracking dirt on freshly laid carpet and flooring (I've seen this mostly on high-end residential but it also happens on commercial projects).
lol
But if they ever get around to making this durable in a construction environment it would save tons of money. Having done the bookkeeping for a small concrete construction firm I can tell you the glove expenditure alone can be several hundred dollars in just one season. Might not sound like a lot, but to a small business it really adds up.
Why do you think construction workers are so different from others?
They may not think about it, but dirt particles can shorten the life of many materials. Particles that make their way into fabric damage the fibers. I forget what mud does to leather, but I'm pretty sure there are deleterious effects there as well.
The coating has been found to be safe for use in nonfood contact areas
of food processing plants. The coating meets FDA and USDA regulations for those
types of applications.
[1] http://www.fastcoexist.com/1679878/mits-freaky-non-stick-coa...
http://www.fastcoexist.com/1679878/mits-freaky-non-stick-coa...
Guess we'll never know :)
EDIT: Follow-ups, thanks for the correction.
PS: I work on this topic, and that is why i keep replying to every post. I am not being facetious.
Obviously the heat would have to transfer to the exterior environment in some way (e.g. through the floor) so this wouldn't work with smartphones.
Apparently a few superhydrophobic coating solutions exist already. On the first sight it looks like Ultra Ever Dry beat everyone in getting their product to consumer market, though.
You could probably retain stability of the boat by painting stripes from front to back. They would act similar to fins.
The site the OP links to is called "Global Industrial" but the only country available on the checkout page is "United States".
(Why they call themselves "global" is beyond me; why they need a select box for only one option is further beyond.)
EDIT: found it: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1092741
The company replied to the suggestion saying yes, the technology has marine uses, and coating a boat with the compound does reduce the drag - the issue being the stability of the boat is reduced in turn which means the running speed needs to be increased to compensate.
http://www.beilstein-journals.org/bjnano/content/pdf/2190-42... A good introduction, and from a journal without paywalls, and having quality papers on the subject.
I guess many applications will be found in every day life.
We expect better from NPR.
Finally such a thing has been invented. That's the future. I'm looking forward for other incredible nanomaterials.