 Are silver nanoparticles good or bad for you? To help answer this, we thought we'd round up 7 facts about silver nano that may surprise you. 1. Silver nanoparticles are released from silverware. Drink water from a silver jug or eat with a silver spoon and you are drinking and eating silver nanoparticles. As silverware has been around since Roman times, we've been doing this for a couple of millennia now, and of course, if you were born with a silver spoon in your mouth, you've probably been doing it more than most. 2. People have been intentionally dosing themselves with silver nanoparticles for over a hundred years. Colloidal silver, suspensions of silver nanoparticles in a liquid, were popular before modern antibiotics came along. Their uses become widespread again in recent years as a cure for, well, if you read the claims, almost anything apparently. There is no clear evidence that drinking colloidal silver is good for you, but the evidence never stopped people from self-medicating before. 3. Silver nanoparticles are pretty good at killing microbes, but it's the silver ions that they slowly release that do most of the damage. This means you don't necessarily need nanoparticles to make products that kill bugs using silver. For instance, the Michigan company Krypton makes commercial fabrics used everywhere from Hyatt hotels to McDonald's that use silver ions to inhibit bacterial growth. And products using ecstatic silver technology are widely used by athletes, the military, medics and others. Both companies use silver as an antibacterial agent, but as far as can be told, neither company uses nanoparticles. 4. It's hard for pathogens to develop resistance to silver nanoparticles because they interfere with microbes in multiple different ways. However, indiscriminate use of silver as an antibacterial agent could still increase the chances of resistance developing, which isn't great news if you're relying on it to protect particularly vulnerable patients. 5. If you're exposed to enough silver, it'll turn your skin blue, a condition called Algeria. This is cosmetically interesting, but not fatal. In fact, it's thought that royals were originally called bluebloods because, you guessed it, those silver spoons turned their lips a delicate shade of royal blue. 6. Silver nanoparticles aren't likely to be much more dangerous than other forms of silver in the human body, as it's the ions that cause the most damage. Although it's still possible that research may throw up some surprises. Nanoparticles, for instance, might find it easier to get to sensitive places like inside cells before dissolving and releasing their payload of silver ions. And we may still find that the nanoparticles trigger the body's immune system in ways that ions do not. That said, a couple of millennia of imbibing silver nanoparticles hasn't thrown up any obvious risk red flags yet. 7. In contrast, silver is bad news for the environment. We learned this with environmental contamination from the photographic film industry. Silver nanoparticles are at least as harmful as the same amount of silver in any other form, possibly more so if the nanoparticles can get to places other forms of silver cannot. This has got some people wondering whether putting silver in everything from socks and kids toys to bedsheets and carpets is a bad idea. To learn more about silver nanoparticles, check out the blog below and, as always, please do join the conversation in the comments.