Momentum is building to establish realistic safety guidelines for the use of nano-particles in product engineering. As I’ve written before, no one yet knows how to use them without danger to living creatures. The particles–far, far tinier than a human hair (1/80,000th the diameter), can easily be breathed in and even absorbed through skin.

Their very tininess is what makes them so powerful: “…At that scale the laws of chemistry and physics bend, giving familiar substances novel chemical, electrical and physical properties” that make for exciting new capabilities. But some nanmaterials are known to cause “fatal inflammation in the lungs of rodents, organ damage in fish and death in ecologically important aquatic organisms and soil-dwelling bacteria.” That’s a lot of life–the very water and soil that our food comes from–at grave risk.

If you’ve never been much on environmentalism–or you think of it as only for tree-huggers–this is the time to change your mind. Read more here (to get a full understandaing, read the whole article). Then start pushing your legislators to do something now (you can find out who yours are with this site).

This is an issue no one on this earth can afford to ignore.