 What are advanced materials and are they safe? In last week's Risk Bites we looked at how our ability to design and engineer materials from atoms up has launched a new era of advanced materials. This week we take a whistle stop tour of how these designer materials are beginning to transform the things we make and how we use them. Over the past a hundred years we have discovered how the arrangement of atoms and materials influences how those materials behave and we've started to use this understanding to design and create new materials that have never before existed. This heady combination of new knowledge and new tools and techniques for manipulating matter is enabling scientists and engineers to create products that were unimaginable just a few years ago. We've effectively opened nature's toolbox and we're starting to play rather seriously with what we've found. Admittedly we're still learning how to use these tools and our knowledge is rather patchy in some areas but already researchers are using them to create an incredible array of materials that push the bounds of the possible. Materials for instance that are lighter stronger and tougher than ever before. Materials that generate and bend and absorb light in unusual ways. Materials that convert sunlight and heat and movement to electricity and other forms of energy. Materials that help get drugs to where they need to be in the body and prevent disease and help create high performance replacement body parts and keep food fresh and make food healthier. Materials that help chemical reactions go faster and that mimic and improve on biology and that allow cells and viruses and organisms to work differently. Materials that enable faster more powerful computers and computers that are just plain different like quantum computers for instance and we've only just started. As our understanding increases we'll see more and more sophisticated materials being developed like materials that adapt to their surroundings and change their behavior accordingly and hybrid materials that combine different advanced materials into super advanced materials. Even materials that blur the boundaries between living systems and everything else. Now that we have the keys to the building blocks of everything we are really only limited by the laws of physics and our imaginations. Without a doubt we live in exciting times. But are these designer materials safe or are we playing a dangerous game here with little thought of the consequences. That is a topic for next week's risk bites. Until then stay safe.