 What are advanced materials? And are they safe? Over the next seven weeks, risk-bites will be looking at advanced materials, what they are, how they're being used, and the safety issues they raise. To start with though, we need to go back to the very beginning. Humans are great at taking lumps of stuff and making them useful. Our ancestors for instance were pretty good at using materials like stone and clay and bronze and iron to make tools and other useful objects. This ability to design and engineer products from the basic materials around us is what has enabled human civilization to become what it is today. As a species, we have been incredibly successful in changing our lives by adding value to the materials we mine or grow or otherwise collect. But until recently, how we made use of these materials was limited by what we could see with our eyes and what we could touch with our hands. Then we discovered atoms and everything changed. Over the period of a few decades at the beginning of the 20th century, scientists and engineers went from being limited by what they could see and touch to being able to play with the basic building blocks of all materials. It was a pivotal point in human development and one that we are only just beginning to realise the full significance of. But what does this mean for advanced materials? Next week, Riskbytes will look at how the atomic revolution opened the door to a new age in materials engineering and how this paved the way to the modern era of advanced designer materials. Until then, stay safe.