Pain Beam to Get Tougher, Smaller, More Powerful
Wired: Danger room | February 6, 2009
The Pentagon’s pain beam weapon could get tougher, smaller, more powerful, and more mobile under a series of new research and development projects. And that could pave the way for the so-called “Active Denial System” to finally be sent to war.
The Pentagon first unveiled ADS in 2001. But in spite of repeated calls to send the system to Iraq for crowd control, the weapon has been held up by a series of legal, political, and technical issues. However, recent contracts may show the way forward for ADS, which zaps the target with a painful, but mostly harmless, microwave blast. The idea is to start building 20 of the revamped systems, beginning in three years.
First off, the pain weapons are going to get tougher. The military is fit the system into an Mine Resistant, Ambush Protected (MRAP) armored vehicle that has become the infantry transport of choice overseas. System 1 of the ADS was mounted in a Hummer, System 2 is a containerized system that takes a sizable truck to haul it. Which sounds like a recipe for turning the beam weapon into a sitting duck. No wonder the military is calling for “studies for the integration of Directed Energy Non-lethal Active Denial Key Systems onto mine resistant armored personnel (MRAP) vehicles.”
Secondly, get more sophisticated. The current system is gigantic, partly because of the requirement for supercooling — System 1 would not function in very hot weather. So a Broad Area Announcement last month calls for for “alternative design concepts” to reduce the volume and weight of each of the System’s four components: the power generation/storage/conditioning, thermal management, beam source and antenna.
We know a little more about what’s going on from the Joint Nonlethal Weapons Program’s newsletter. It mentions that compact solid state beam sources are being investigated that are much smaller than the existing monster Gyrotron. They’re also looking at a sheet beam Klystron, an advanced amplifier technology which could “increase system power by six-fold.”
Last time the military tried to shrink the ADS to fit a smaller vehicle it was not a success;
they ended up with a beam which was only 400 watts (compared to about
100 kilowatts) and did not have the range and power needed. It was deleted from an experimental, nonlethal-weapons-packed vehicle program. On the other hand, the action-packed, game-show style field test of the low-power ADS looked amazing…but this time they will be aiming for better results.
All the previous Active Denial Systems have been built by Raytheon; the company even makes a commercial version, Silent Guardian. But this is a competitive contract, calling for at least two contractors and no favoritism.
Thirdly, it’s going to have a new name. The official documents have now started referring to the vehicle-mounted version of the pain ray as Mobile ADS, contracted to MADS. This is probably because other versions, such as the Portable ADS or PADS are in the pipeline. I always thought that “Active Denial” was a weak name, but calling it MADS may not be an improvement… cue a slew of bad insanity jokes. Perhaps Danger Room readers can suggest a better name, preferably based on an acronym?
Read More http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/02/pain-beam-getti/#ixzz0cH75TbaW
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US Army, we rain down the pain!
My girlfriend’s hot, but she has a built-in cooling system
LAS VEGAS: Roxxxy the sex robot had a coming-out party in Sin City at the weekend.
In what is billed as a world first, a life-size robotic girlfriend complete with artificial intelligence and flesh-like synthetic skin was introduced to adoring fans at the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas on Saturday.
”She can’t vacuum, she can’t cook, but she can do almost anything else if you know what I mean,” said her inventor, Douglas Hines, of the company TrueCompanion.
”She’s a companion. She has a personality. She hears you. She listens to you. She speaks. She feels your touch. She goes to sleep. We are trying to replicate a personality of a person.”
At 170-centimetres tall and 54.43 kilograms, Roxxxy ”has a full C cup and is ready for action”, said Hines, who was an artificial intelligence engineer at Bell Laboratories before he started up TrueCompanion.
The anatomically correct robot has an articulated skeleton, which means it can move like a person even though it cannot walk or move its limbs independently.
Robotic movement is built into ”the three inputs” and a mechanical heart that powers a liquid cooling system.
Roxxxy comes with five personalities. Wild Wendy is outgoing and adventurous. Frigid Farrah is reserved and shy. There is a young and naive personality and a Mature Martha that Hines describes as having a ”matriarchal kind of caring”. S&M Susan is geared for more adventurous types.
Aspiring partners can customise such features as race, hair colour and breast size. A male sex robot named Rocky is in development.
People ordering the robots online at truecompanion.com detail their tastes and interests to get the mechanical girlfriend in synch with her mate.
”She knows exactly what you like,” says Hines. ”If you like Porsches, she likes Porsches. If you like soccer, she likes soccer.” Roxxxy can chat with her flesh-and-blood mate, and touching her elicits a variety of comments.
Inspiration for the sex robot sprang from the September 11, 2001 attacks. ”I had a friend who passed away in 9/11,” Hines said. ”I promised myself I would create a program to store his personality, and that became the foundation for Roxxxy True Companion.”
Hines sees the robot as a recreational innovation and an outlet for the shy, people with sexual dysfunction and those who want to experiment without risk.
Roxxxy costs between $US7000 ($7634) and $US9000 depending on features.
Google’s Android Allows Soldiers to Put Drones on Buddy List
By Jeremy Hsu
Google’s Android operating system for cell phones could allow soldiers to track fellow squad members and even unmanned drones in real time on a map — as long as the humans and robots are on their buddy list.
That’s just one use of an Android-based application developed by defense giant Raytheon. The Raytheon Android Tactical System (RATS) costs just a few hundred dollars per user, as opposed to thousands for other systems, and allows anyone familiar with a smart phone to immediately start using it.
For instance, warfighters can watch their little drone buddy’s flight patterns on a map, or even get streaming video from the overhead aerial view. RATS also enables soldiers to send snapshots of suspects to the Department of Defense’s private data network for immediate identification, and could even include biometric scanners to capture fingerprints in the near future.
Raytheon plans to deploy RATS within the next month or so, after two years of development, according to Forbes. We’re looking forward to the future editions where users can control their robot swarms using basic body language.
Laser creates ‘false memories’ in fly brains
New Scientist – October 15, 2009
A flash of laser light can alter the brains of fruit flies so that they learn to fear pain that they never actually felt.
Gero Miesenböck at the University of Oxford and his colleagues genetically engineered fruit flies so that a handful of their nerve cells fired when lit up with a laser.
This allowed them to write false pain “memories” into the fruit flies’ brains. “These memories cause a lasting modification of the flies’ behaviour,” says Miesenböck.
It is known that the release of dopamine by neurons in the “mushroom body” – part of the fruit fly brain – is critical to learning. But it was not known whether behaviour can be conditioned by stimulating these neurons directly, without the fly having any real experience.
Lessons in pain
To investigate, Miesenböck and his colleagues started by putting ordinary fruit flies into a small chamber while two different odours were pumped in from either end to create two separate odour streams.
The researchers delivered an electric shock each time a fly strayed into a particular odour stream, which taught the flies to prefer the other one: the flies learned to move in the direction of the shock-related odour 30 per cent less often.
Once he had shown that the flies had learned to avoid pain, Miesenböck decided to see if similar conditioning could be created by stimulating neurons without actually hurting the flies.
Bright ideas
His team started by genetically engineering a second set of fruit flies so that their dopamine-producing brain cells manufactured a membrane protein called P2X2. When P2X2 binds to a molecule called ATP, the neuron that produced it fires as if zapped by an electric shock.
The team then made these P2X2 neurons light-sensitive by injecting the flies with a form of ATP that is activated only by a laser. By injecting the light-sensitive ATP into different neurons in different flies, they were able to produce flies with different combinations of light-sensitive neurons.
The researchers then put these genetically modified flies into the smell chamber. This time, when the flies strayed into a particular odour stream, the researchers flashed them with a laser beam instead of zapping them with an electric shock as they had with the normal flies.
Many of the flies did not react. But flies that had 12 particular light-sensitive neurons chose to move in the direction of the laser-related odour 28 per cent less of the time – almost exactly the same result as in the unmodified flies that were exposed to electric shocks.
Miesenböck concludes that stimulating dopamine release in these 12 neurons has the same effect as applying electric shocks to flies. In other words, these flies feared that smell as if they had been conditioned to associate an electric shock with it. “Stimulating just these neurons gives the flies a memory of an unpleasant event that never happened,” he says.
Like fly, like human?
He says that it is likely that humans form memories in a similar way. “I would be surprised if the way humans learn from mistakes turned out to be fundamentally different from the way flies learn from mistakes.”
“The scientists have identified a discrete population of nerve cells that are seemingly the source of ‘memory’,” adds Richard Baines, a neuroscientist based at the University of Manchester, UK. “This represents a further demonstration of the power of using organisms like the fruit fly for understanding how the human brain works.”
However, Wayne Sossin, who studies the biochemical pathways of memory formation at the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital – part of McGill University, Canada – points out that it will be difficult to show that human memories work in the same way. “It would be unethical to engineer transgenic humans and tell them what memories to have,” he says.
He also says that there may be other ways to form memories, apart from stimulating dopamine-producing neurons. “This is an inherently very neat experiment, but further research is needed in some areas,” he says. “They showed that activation of a small subset of neurons is sufficient to cause learning, but they didn’t show that these neurons are actually activated during normal learning.”
He thinks that Miesenböck’s team should also have looked at long-term memories, which may form via separate biochemical pathways.
The next step is to identify the “upstream” cells that control the activity of these 12 neurons, says Miesenböck. He says this will “point like a finger” to the sites where the flies’ memories are physically stored.
Journal references: Neuron, vol 33, p 15; Cell, DOI 10.1016/j.cell.2009.08.034
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From Kubrick’s ‘A Clockwork Orange’ based on the book by Anthony Burgess
Prison Chaplain: Choice! The boy has not a real choice, has he? Self-interest, the fear of physical pain drove him to that grotesque act of self-abasement. The insincerity was clear to be seen. He ceases to be a wrongdoer. He ceases also to be a creature capable of moral choice.
Minister: Padre, there are subtleties! We are not concerned with motives, with the higher ethics. We are concerned only with cutting down crime and with relieving the ghastly congestion in our prisons. He will be your true Christian, ready to turn the other cheek, ready to be crucified rather than crucify, sick to the heart at the thought of killing a fly. Reclamation! Joy before the angels of God! The point is that it works.
Empathetic virtual humans on the way
Humans may soon be able to develop long-term relationships with virtual humans that are capable of reading and adapting to our emotions, say French researchers.
Professor Catherine Pelachaud, director of research from the Paris Institute of Technology presented her research this week at a meeting of the ARC Network in Human Communication Science in Sydney.
Professor Pelachaud and colleagues are developing virtual humans, called Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs), that can act autonomously in a virtual environment.
As well as speaking, the agents communicate with facial expressions, head movements, hand gestures and gaze.
Professor Pelachaud and US researcher Professor Justine Cassell developed the first autonomous agents in 1994. Since then the focus has been on making the agents more expressive and more able to read and adapt to the emotions of users.
Professor Pelachaud says people have high expectations of virtual humans and often lose interest quickly in them because they do not appear to be very ‘human’.
Professor Pelachaud hopes to develop agents that maintain the interest of users over a longer term.
In one project, called Semaine, the researchers are developing four agents with different personalities.
“We’ve been working on creating distinctive agents,” she said.
They are testing how real humans respond when confronted by agents who are variously aggressive, gloomy, energetically positive or pragmatic.
Professor Pelachaud says this is providing basic data for developing agents that could be useful in teaching and medical programs, and for virtual assistants in information kiosks or virtual characters in entertainment.
Empathetic agents
In related research, the researchers are developing an agent that they say can empathise with real humans.
For example, a virtual agent on a screen can be taught to detect, via webcam, the emotion of a person looking at the screen.
The agent can then react appropriately.
Professor Pelachaud says this could be useful in applications where a person is seeking information from the agent.
She says if the agent gets it wrong and detects the person becoming upset, it could show empathy through non-verbal signs, and this could help reduce the frustration the person feels.
“Having an agent that shows empathy can enhance the relationship between a user an agent,” she said.
“The user may still not get the information, but at least they won’t feel so negative from the the interaction.”
Interactive story-telling
Professor Pelachaud and colleagues are also researching the use of agents in interactive television and storytelling as part of the CALLAS project.
One prototype demonstrates emotional interaction between the audience and an agent, who acts as a virtual audience member, which is able to relate to the human audience via webcam and microphone.
“The agent, through its participation of watching the movie and its display of emotion, could enhance the emotional experience of the audience,” she says.
Both human and virtual audience members react to a virtual scenario in which a second agent is involved.
In the scenario the second agent is walking around in a kitchen, in which normally inanimate objects do randomly frightening things.
For example, a knife might suddenly fly through the air towards them or the stove might suddenly catch alight.
The human and virtual audience react with fear as these things occur and the agent in the scene responds to their fear.
The research is funded by the French Government and European Union.
Japanese robot ‘wired to monkey’s brain’
Japanese and US researchers say they have created a humanoid robot that acts according to the brain activity of a monkey from all the way across the Pacific.
The experiment is part of efforts to develop prosthetic limbs which can be mentally controlled by people with disabilities.
A laboratory in the western Japanese city of Kyoto has unveiled a 155-centimetre tall humanoid, with a friendly looking face and bulging black eyes, who walks via signals coming into its legs through wires.
Researchers say the robot responds to the cortical brain activity of a monkey that walks while attached to wires on a treadmill at Duke University in North Carolina. The signal is sent via the internet.
“We were able to detect the monkey’s brain activity while walking on the treadmill and relay the data from the United States to Japan,” the Japan Science and Technology Agency said.
“For the first time in the world, we were then able to make our humanoid robot in Japan walk in real-time in a similar manner as the monkey.
“We can say that we have made another big step to the realisation of a neural prosthetic device that could one day restore lower limb motor functions for paralysed patients.”
The robot is designed by the Japanese agency and Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh to move by responding to brain activity signals.
Army Terminators Walk Like Men
WIRED Danger Room | 21 May, 2009
Round four of mankind’s epic battle against the walking, talking, killer machines starts tonight with the opening of Terminator Salvation. But humanoid robots aren’t confined to the movies. Turns out the U.S. military is backing research into robots that act like people, as well.
Today, the American armed forces’ main ground robots, the Foster-Miller Talon and iRobot’s Packbot, look like boxes with caterpillar tracks. It’s a nice, stable design. And it works well — which is why the military has sent thousands of ‘em over to Afghanistan and Iraq.
But these robots don’t easily fit into a world that we humans have constructed for creatures that operate like us. Door handles only work if you have something like a hand — and it has to be at the right height, too. Wheels and tracks get stuck on obstacles that legs just jump over. So it makes sense, sometimes, to shape a machine like a man.
One of the American military’s leading humanoid robots is Petman. Its job will be to testing chemical protection clothing for the U.S. Army. Petman is being built by Boston Dynamics, famous for its alarmingly lifelike BigDog robotic pack mule. Unlike earlier suit-testing robots, which needed external support, Petman will stand — and walk — on his own two feet.
“Petman will balance itself and move freely; walking, crawling and doing a variety of suit-stressing calisthenics during exposure to chemical warfare agents,” the company promises. “Petman will also simulate human physiology within the protective suit by controlling temperature, humidity and sweating when necessary, all to provide realistic test conditions. ”
A sweating robot? I had a flashback to the first Terminator movie:
“The 600 series had rubber skin. We spotted them easy. These are new. They look human. Sweat, bad breath, everything….”
Petman needs to precisely simulate human movement, and the makers say it will be “the first anthropomorphic robot that moves dynamically like a real person, with natural, agile movement.” The mecha-man is described as “BigDog’s Big Brother.” In fact, his bottom half is simply a pair of BigDog legs.
The program will consist of 13 months of design and 17 months of construction. The finished product being delivered in 2011. (Will they have to deliver Petman, or will they just give him the address and send him off?)
Meanwhile, Bucknell University researchers have received a $1.2 million grant for research and development of military robots, including a 5-foot-tall bipedal walker.
“It would move over curbs, up stairs and around rubble,” says Keith Buffinton, professor of mechanical engineering. “It could be used for surveillance and to gather information in areas you would not want to risk human life.”
The machine is already taking its first steps and is said to be better at balancing than a human. Professor Steven Shooter says they’ll be able to give the robot a head (complete with cameras) and “arm-like devices to assist with balancing.”
It’s unlikely that killer robots are walking among us just yet. But in a few years someone with a rather mechanical gait who refuses to take off his motorcycle helmet may not be quite what he seem.
Bonus feature… and spoiler alert…
There are new non-human Terminators in the new movie as well, including a variety of riderless motorbikes called Moto-Terminators. Once again, science fiction is only just ahead of science fact.
In 2005, one of the competitors in Darpa’s Grand Challenge for robot vehicles was an unmanned motor bike called Ghost Rider.
This was based on a 90-cc dirt bike outfitted with sensors, gyros for steering and video cameras for eyes. The designer, Anthony Levandowski of University of California, Berkeley, said that the two-wheel layout made it more maneuverable than the big Jeeps and trucks fielded by other competitors. It also as kept costs down. The whole thing cost just $150,000, which puts it in the bargain basement for military robotics.
An article in Berkeley Engineering’s newsletter later said that Levandowski “hopes to keep Ghostrider alive by continuing to refine its subsystems, like the obstacle avoidance software, for potential use in unmanned scouting and surveillance operations.”
Of course unmanned craft like the Predator also started out on scouting and surveillance duty — before someone decided to arm them.
Future Warbot Powered by Xbox Controller
WIRED Danger Room | 12 June, 2009
The military has long been interested in unmanned ground vehicles that can haul soldier equipment or scout perimeters. Equally important, the vehicles must be simple and intuitive to operate.
Over at the Flash Blog, Lee Brimelow has an interesting scoop on how an XBox 360 interface was designed for the R-Gator, an unmanned vehicle prototype John Deere and iRobot first unveiled in 2004. Software firm T8DESIGN built the Adobe Integrated Runtime interface for the R-Gator; Brimelow has some images of how it looks on screen.
In addition to hauling gear or supplies, the R-Gator could also be used as a sentry. Brimelow says the vehicle could be equipped with a system called REDOWL, or Robot Enhanced Detection Outpost with Lasers, a sniper detection system that uses acoustic sensors and cameras to zero in on hostile gunfire.
The military has already opted for XBox and PlayStation-style controllers on robots like the PackBot, a small, portable robot that has already seen service in Iraq and Afghanistan. I’ve tried out the Small Unmanned Ground Vehicle, a next-generation version of PackBot, and it’s similarly easy to master the controls. Thousands of these smaller robots are already in the field.
Designing and controlling larger unmanned vehicles, however, is a somewhat trickier proposition. The military has experimented with the General Dynamics “Mobile Detection and Assessment and Response System,” or MDARS, a system that has been in the works since 1989. The U.S. Army has developed a six-wheeled robotic vehicle, Lockheed Martin’s MULE, as part of its Future Combat Systems program, but the future of FCS is uncertain following recent budget cuts. The R-Gator is more of an off-the-shelf solution: it’s based on the M-Gator, a golf-cart sized military utility vehicle.
Plug and Play: Researchers Expand Clinical Study of Neural Interface Brain Implant
Scientific American | 12 June, 2009
Having proved in 2004 that plugging a sensor into the human brain’s motor cortex could turn the thoughts of paralysis victims into action, a team of Brown University scientists now has the green light from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) institutional review board to expand its efforts developing technology that reconnects the brain to lifeless limbs.
Brown’s BrainGate Neural Interface System—conceived in 2000 with the help of a $4.25-million U.S. Defense Department grant—includes a baby aspirin–size brain sensor containing 100 electrodes, each thinner than a human hair, that connects to the surface of the motor cortex (the part of the brain that enables voluntary movement), registers electrical signals from nearby neurons, and transmits them through gold wires to a set of computers, processors and monitors. (ScientificAmerican.com in 2006 wrote about one patient’s experience using BrainGate during its first phase of trials.)
The researchers designed BrainGate to assist those suffering from spinal cord injuries, muscular dystrophy, brain stem stroke, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s Disease), and other motor neuron diseases. During the initial testing five years ago, patients suffering from paralysis demonstrated their ability to use brain signals sent from their motor cortex to control external devices such as computer screen cursors and robotic arms just by thinking about them. “The signals may have been disconnected from the (participant’s) limb, but they were still there,” says Leigh Hochberg, a Brown associate professor of engineering and a vascular and critical care neurologist at MGH who is helping lead the research.
Due to the high risk of plugging a device directly into the brain, the FDA in 2004 granted the BrainGate system an investigational device exemption so that researchers could begin testing the unit in patients and collect data about its safety and effectiveness. Thanks to the success of those early tests, the researchers last week kicked off a pilot clinical trial, dubbed BrainGate2. Although the technology is similar to what was used in the original testing, the researchers are looking to enlist up to 15 patients this time and gather more information that will help them better understand brain signals as well as “the method by which we decode them,” Hochberg says. Since the initial four-person clinical trial launched five years ago, “we have a better appreciation for things that we need to learn.”
A successful BrainGate2 trial could open up a number of new possibilities, including the use of a second sensor to stimulate both sides of the motor cortex, says John Donoghue, a Brown neuroscience professor and director of the Brown Institute for Brain Science. Researchers thus far have implanted the sensor in the side of the brain that controls a patient’s dominant side—the left cortex for righties and the right cortex for lefties.
BrainGate2 is part of a larger mission to help paralysis victims regain control of their bodies. “We want to reconnect the brain back to the muscles and eventually back to the entire limb,” Donoghue says. “We are attempting to recreate parts of the nervous system that have been disconnected from the brain.”
Hochberg expects this second phase to last for several years, “depending on what we learn and how quickly we learn it.” The research project has received about $8 million in funding over the past three years from a number of organizations, including the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.
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A promising start (see above), a possible ends? (see below)
A clip from series episode ‘Brain Scratch’ from the series ‘Cowboy Bebop’ directed by Shinichiro Watanabe.
In this possible future, ‘Scratch’ is a cult that believes in achieving eternal life by digitising the soul and uploading it onto the internet. As cult members start committing suicide a bounty is put out for their leader Dr. Landes. But there is no such man. He is a fictional figure created by 15 year old paralysis victim Ronnie Spangoen. While his body is vegetated, his brain is connected to the internet where he is free to live without the burdens of physicality.
Spike Spiegel: Why do you kill off members of your own group,Whats the point of that?
Dr. Londes: I am not forcing anything on anyone. They are merely practicing a faith they decided to believe in of their own free will. Tell me, Why do you think people believe in god ? Because they want to. It’s not easy living in an ugly corrupt world. There is no certainty, nothing to hope for. People are lost, so they reach out. Don’t you get it ? God didn’t create humans… No!, Its humans who created god
In Scratch, men can become gods. Living digitally means living without pain. Without pain and thus without fear. Without fear and thus with no restraint- freedom; absolute freedom. Is this a good thing? Well…. living without consequences means we lack empathy. No empathy, no morality. This situation inevitably breeds a new kind of criminal. Where there are no direct consequences we are more likely to operate without restraint. Moral boundaries are not only blurred, they cease to exist.
And of justice.
In the example of Ronnie Spangoen, a warrant was put out for his physical arrest. But it’s useless to arrest his physical body and so his brain is disconnected. Now with no way to engage meaningfully with the outside world, he is a prisoner in his own body. But is this ethical? Is this ‘justice’? In the new world ‘justice’ will be the next issue of contention.
Green groups raise nanotechnology fears
Environmentalists have raised concerns the ever-expanding application of nanotechnology may be doing humans harm.
With developments in nanotechnology opening up new applications for silver, the alarm is being raised on how much of it we are being exposed to.
The use of bacteria-fighting silver in medicine stretches from the 18th century until the introduction of penicillin.
With the emergence of antibiotic-resistant superbugs, the use of silver in wound dressings and surgical equipment is once again an attractive option.
But it has also become a hot commodity in marketing household products like cosmetics, washing machines, clothes and hair dryers, and its regular exposure to humans is breaking down its efficacy.
A nanotechnology campaigner with Friends of the Earth, Dr Rye Senjen, says many people now come into contact with nano-silver every day.
“In the last say three or four years, many manufacturers have started incorporating nano-silver in consumer products and that is very concerning to us,” he said.
“Quite readily in Australia you can find it in sports shops, in underwear. You can find it in children’s playmats. Equipment like combs and dryers, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, dishwashers.”
The use of miniscule particles of silver on household products is promoted as a way to keep them germ-free. Dr Senjen says experience with antibiotics shows that much exposure may not be a good thing.
“It gives off a low-level of silver ions that kill bacteria but don’t kill enough bacteria and then the bacteria become resistant and that is, of course, what we are already seeing in a lot of anti-bacterials that they use in hospitals,” he said.
“They become resistant to the germ killer and then we are in a real pickle because we really need it for those serious cases and not for everyday prising of dirt when in reality, a little bit of dirt is probably a good thing.”
Dr Senjen says there is considerable evidence that bacteria can develop a resistance to nano-silver.
“There has been 20 different papers that have reported it,” he said.
The president of the Australian Society for Microbiology, Professor Hatch Stokes, says he doubts the use of nano-silver in household products is effective.
“The promotion of these types of nano-particles is probably a marketing tool,” he said.
“I think there is a bit of an analogy here with the use of antibiotics. People know that in a medical context, antibiotics can be lifesaving but there has been a general rise in bacteria becoming resistant in recent years and clearly, under those circumstances, part of the reason for that is the overuse of antibiotics, particularly outside a clinical context.
“So what we have today is antibiotic-resistant bacteria are essentially making their way back through the food chain.
“I would be particularly worried that the evolutionary forces that are driving an increase in resistance to antibiotics could come into play here as well.”
Friends of the Earth is calling for a ban on the sale of all commercial products containing nano-silver until there is more legislation to regulate nanotechnology.
