Your brain is sponging up toxic nanomagnets from polluted air
Anyone who’s lived in a smoggy city would likely welcome the idea of using widely dispersed air filters to soak up all those toxic tidbits floating around—unless, of course, those filters were functioning human brains.
Our noggins naturally catch and collect the toxic, magnetic nanoparticles that we inadvertently inhale from polluted air, according to a study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Those wee particles, made of the strongly magnetic iron oxide compound, magnetite, have been found in human brains before and were thought to be normal and harmless byproducts of biological processes. But according to the new study, a closer examination of minuscule metal balls in 37 human brains revealed that they’re actually from smog, formed during combustion or friction-derived heating, such as slamming on the brakes of a car.
