Is the carbon nanotube report bad science? and a jazz moment

I found a rebuttal to that study carbon nanotube could be like asbestos study that’s been published in Nature Nanotechnology. The summaries of the study all said that ‘long’ carbon nanotubes resemble asbestos fibres and, according to this first study, create the same kinds of lesions as asbestos when tested on mice. The rebuttal (found at Small Times), which is based on an interview with the CEO of a company that produces long carbon nanotubes commercially, makes this point: ‘Long’ as defined by the study meant anything over 20 microns and the longest carbon nanotube used in the study was 56 microns. His company, Nanocomp Technologies, produces carbon nanotubes that are millimetre-long. That’s a pretty significant difference in scale which may explain why the CEO described the report as ‘bad science’. The whole thing keeps raising more questions for me i.e. What is the standard length of commercially produced carbon nanotubes? At what point does length have an impact?  For example, is there a different impact or no impact if the length is a millimetre-long rather than 56 microns?

A friend of mine is a jazz singer who’s performing tonight (Friday nights through July 2008) at the Fairview Pub, 898 West Broadway, Vancouver, BC. She’s on from 6-9 pm. For a sample, you can listen to her here.

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