A Nanodrop in the Bucket
The Environmental Protection Agency has decided to spend a measly $4 million studying the health and environmental risks posed by manufactured nanoparticles–only 0.1 percent of the $3.7 billion the federal government has committed to the technology over the next four years. It’s almost as if they’re afraid what they might find out. An EPA official calls it “infinitely morethan has ever been done before,” and theoretically she’s right–because none has been done before, despite the advances that have already taken place in the field. Activist groups like Environmental Defense and the ETC Group are calling for funding more like $100 million–more appropriate for a field that’s growing fast and is predicted to change the future, and one for which deleterious effects have already been found in fish. You can’t find what you don’t go looking for, and this is too little, too late.
Keep Reading
Most Popular
The inside story of how ChatGPT was built from the people who made it
Exclusive conversations that take us behind the scenes of a cultural phenomenon.
How Rust went from a side project to the world’s most-loved programming language
For decades, coders wrote critical systems in C and C++. Now they turn to Rust.
Design thinking was supposed to fix the world. Where did it go wrong?
An approach that promised to democratize design may have done the opposite.
Sam Altman invested $180 million into a company trying to delay death
Can anti-aging breakthroughs add 10 healthy years to the human life span? The CEO of OpenAI is paying to find out.
Stay connected
Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review
Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.