I read 'bl00's link before the original article, and my first thought was nanoparticle exposure. Nanoparticle toxicity is proportional to particle surface-area/volume ratio, so if you have some kind of source material that corrodes or oxidizes and produces the wrong geometry of small byproduct particulates, whether immediately or through another process, it's potentially a health hazard. I'm sure Lockheed's internals have already passed word around.
Interesting. That was not my first thought because "nanoparticles" are, in my mind, those things that make the oil I lubricate my throttle cable gunky. What sort of nanoparticle are you thinking? Where would it come from? 'cuz beyond "asbestos" and "buckyballs" my knowledge is extremely limited.
The field of Nanotoxicology is something we're still hammering out. Like with asbestos, the particles in question, somehow apparently manufactured by Lockheed, are made airborne and then inhaled. The chemical pathway after absorption is much quicker to produce symptoms in this instance, but the uptake mechanism is basically the same (as asbestos). So is prevention: stop using whatever materials are producing airborne nanoparticles. P.S. nanoparticles confined within a fluid you're only exposing your already-oiled hands to is usually cool. We've been working with grease for a long time, obviously.
Sure. I attended a university that was into nanoparticles and biophysics. Here's one cool thing I remember. Long story short, people are injecting "cloaked" gold nanoparticle structures to a cancer site, which you then zap with a small blast of infrared light. The wavelength should be on the order of the tip-to-tip diameter of the average gold nanoparticle, so longer/larger than what we have as a source in food microwaves, which target the size/wavelength of water. This otherwise-benign radiation excites the gold nanoparticles, which destroy the cells of the tumor, leaving the surrounding tissue unscathed. A polymer coating cloaks the gold nanoparticle from immune system detection, and if I recall correctly, the shape of the gold nanoparticles was spiky, like a 3-dimensional 20-pointed star. So, imagine a star with vertices at each face of a D&D dice. I gotta sit more colloquiums, across every discipline I can infiltrate. Free knowledge, yo. Edit: apparently the targeted wavelengths for gold nanoparticle excitation are in the near-infrared, which are quite shorter than water wavelengths. The food microwave wavelength is much longer that I thought, because they're not targeting a molecular resonance, H20 is already so polar that it just rides any EM in the microwave range, rotational excitations converted to thermal energy. K thanks. Sorry.