Fast-developing know-how makes our khakis resist stains, artificial bones more practical and diesel burn more efficiently.

That nanotechnology builds microscopic wonders inhabiting a man-made universe that smothers stink and mops up pollution by working on a scale that makes a dust mite look gargantuan.

Yet research still in its infancy, and trailing the deployment of emerging commercial applications, suggests those same breakthroughs in nanotechnology might some day make Midwestern crops less bountiful.

Scientists in California planted soybeans in soil doused with two kinds of metallic nanoparticles to see if the super-small manufactured stuff would just sit in the dirt like miniature pebbles or become part of the plants.

In ground spiked with zinc oxide nanoparticles, soybeans seemed to fare slightly better than normal. In soil treated with cerium oxide nanoparticles, the plants grew fewer leaves and punier bean pods.

Both examples, researchers wrote, showed the micro-materials became part of the plants.

That raises implications for the fields of Kansas, Missouri and the rest of the Grain Belt where, scientists presume, manufactured nanoparticles have been accumulating for a few decades now.

The stuff is going to end up somewhere, said Patricia Holden, a professor of environmental microbiology at the University of California-Santa Barbara and a lead researcher in the soybean study. Were only beginning to learn what that might mean.

Her research, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences earlier this year, raises fresh worries about nanotechnology. Some critics say its becoming quickly integrated into the modern economy and the world environment faster than scientists can sort out its potential dangers.

We need to put together a model where were thinking this through before we get to a point that we cant undo it, said Patty Lovera, an assistant director of the consumer advocacy group Food & Water Watch.

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Could nanotechnology pose threat to crops?