 What are advanced materials? And are they safe? Over the past three weeks, RiskBytes has covered a brief history of advanced materials, designer materials that behave differently because they've been engineered from atoms up. These materials have the ability to transform our lives, from enhancing our lifestyles to helping prevent and treat disease, to ensuring global access to food, water and energy. Advanced materials hold incredible potential, but are they safe? Or do their unique properties come with unusual and worrisome risks? It's a smart question. Advanced materials are designed to behave differently from more conventional materials, and it's reasonable to assume that this different behavior could lead to different risk. The safety question has led to millions of dollars worth of research into the safety of one particular group of advanced materials over the past decade, engineered nanomaterials. And for good reason, our bodies have evolved over millennia to handle the natural materials we have evolved alongside, and even then, they're not perfect. So how are they expected to cope with something that has never before existed in the history of humanity, like, for instance, precisely engineered nanoparticles of gold or silver or other substances? And what happens when something that has been designed to, say, speed up chemical reactions or be part of a super strong material or to convert one form of energy into another gets into our body? Do these unique and unusual properties also lead to unique and unusual risks? If advanced materials are going to be as useful as we think they could be, these are really important questions. The last thing we need is a wonder material that ends up causing disease or harming the environment. It's not good for the people it affects, and it's certainly not good for business. But how do we know what makes an advanced material potentially dangerous and how future risks can be avoided? To answer that, we need to start with what we know about what makes any material risky and build up from there. And this is where we'll be going with next week's Risk Bites. Until then, stay safe.