OP here. Believe it or not, Im aware what rust and sand are made of. Iron oxide is an essential nutrient your body craves and has billions of years of evolutio

OP here. Believe it or not, Im aware what rust and sand are made of. Iron oxide is an essential nutrient your body craves and has billions of years of evolution to process. Sand has no biological use and is completely inaccessible to biological systems. While chemically inert, it is chemically active through its ability to provide a surface for catalysis and biologically active by being able to cut bio membranes. Furthermore, nanoscale "ceramics" (is SiO2 a ceramic? I think so) are far more catalytically active than their bulk counterpart due to the sharp vertices and edges. Nano scale rods of SiO2 is not sand. It only shares chemical formula, which is a sophomoric understanding of chemistry. Anyway steel and SiO2 are not even close to the same category in terms of chemical resistance. For starters the person you replied to said stainless steel, not steel which corrodes like crazy. But even if it were stainless steel, stainless steel isn't stainless and will corrode. Especially at the nanoscale. By comparison SiO2 will never degrade. AFAIK only HF attacks SiO2, and I know of no biological systems that use F. "Si is not SiO2!" you protest. So? SiO2's lattice habit and constant matches Si's almost exactly. This means that SiO2 will adhere to Si very well protecting it. Since O is everywhere, SiO2 will form. Since the material we're talking about here is a nanoscale and narrow aspect ratio, it's likely to fully oxide the Si turning this into nanoscale asbestos. This despite the reduced diffusion from the low T since: - there isn't much length to diffuse at the nanoscale - narrow, nanoscale structures have different bond, surface and volume energetics which favor passivation rxn by the O. In short, these researchers have to prove this isn't going to stay forever in the environment piercing bio membranes until evolution incorporates HF into our gene pool. Btw, I propose novel ways to make nanoscale thermite for a living. Im hardly an innocent party.