Found 9764 publications. Showing page 343 of 391:
2022
To cope with the high number of nanomaterials manufactured, it is essential to develop high-throughput methods for in vitro toxicity screening. At the same time, the issue with interference of the nanomaterial (NM) with the read-out or the reagent of the assay needs to be addressed to avoid biased results. Thus, validated label-free methods are urgently needed for hazard identification of NMs to avoid unintended adverse effects on human health. The colony forming efficiency (CFE) assay is a label- and interference-free method for quantification of cytotoxicity by cell survival and colony forming efficiency by CFE formation. The CFE has shown to be compatible with toxicity testing of NMs. Here we present an optimized protocol for a higher-throughput set up.
Frontiers Media S.A.
2022
Background
The NORMAN Association (https://www.norman-network.com/) initiated the NORMAN Suspect List Exchange (NORMAN-SLE; https://www.norman-network.com/nds/SLE/) in 2015, following the NORMAN collaborative trial on non-target screening of environmental water samples by mass spectrometry. Since then, this exchange of information on chemicals that are expected to occur in the environment, along with the accompanying expert knowledge and references, has become a valuable knowledge base for “suspect screening” lists. The NORMAN-SLE now serves as a FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) chemical information resource worldwide.
Results
The NORMAN-SLE contains 99 separate suspect list collections (as of May 2022) from over 70 contributors around the world, totalling over 100,000 unique substances. The substance classes include per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), pharmaceuticals, pesticides, natural toxins, high production volume substances covered under the European REACH regulation (EC: 1272/2008), priority contaminants of emerging concern (CECs) and regulatory lists from NORMAN partners. Several lists focus on transformation products (TPs) and complex features detected in the environment with various levels of provenance and structural information. Each list is available for separate download. The merged, curated collection is also available as the NORMAN Substance Database (NORMAN SusDat). Both the NORMAN-SLE and NORMAN SusDat are integrated within the NORMAN Database System (NDS). The individual NORMAN-SLE lists receive digital object identifiers (DOIs) and traceable versioning via a Zenodo community (https://zenodo.org/communities/norman-sle), with a total of > 40,000 unique views, > 50,000 unique downloads and 40 citations (May 2022). NORMAN-SLE content is progressively integrated into large open chemical databases such as PubChem (https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/) and the US EPA’s CompTox Chemicals Dashboard (https://comptox.epa.gov/dashboard/), enabling further access to these lists, along with the additional functionality and calculated properties these resources offer. PubChem has also integrated significant annotation content from the NORMAN-SLE, including a classification browser (https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/classification/#hid=101).
Conclusions
The NORMAN-SLE offers a specialized service for hosting suspect screening lists of relevance for the environmental community in an open, FAIR manner that allows integration with other major chemical resources. These efforts foster the exchange of information between scientists and regulators, supporting the paradigm shift to the “one substance, one assessment” approach. New submissions are welcome via the contacts provided on the NORMAN-SLE website (https://www.norman-network.com/nds/SLE/).
Springer
2022
With the current possible presence of thousands of PFAS compounds in industrial emissions, there is an increasing need to assess the impacts of PFAS regulation of conventional PFAS on one hand and the exposure to emerging and yet unknown PFAS on the other. Today’s analytical methodologies using targeted approaches are not sufficient to determine the complete suite of PFAS present. To evaluate the presence of unknown PFAS, we investigated in this study the occurrence of an extended range of target PFAS in various species from the marine and terrestrial Norwegian environment, in relation to the extractable organic fluorine (EOF), which yields the total amount of organic fluorine. The results showed a varying presence of extractable fluorinated organics, with glaucous gull eggs, otter liver and polar bear plasma showing the highest EOF and a high abundance of PFAS as well. The targeted PFAS measurements explained 1% of the organic fluorine for moose liver as the lowest and 94% for otter liver as the highest. PFCAs like trifluoro acetic acid (TFA, reported semi-quantitatively), played a major role in explaining the organic fluorine present. Emerging PFAS as the perfluoroethylcyclohexane sulfonate (PFECHS), was found in polar bear plasma in quantifiable amounts for the first time, confirming earlier detection in arctic species far removed from emission sources. To enable a complete organic fluorine mass balance in wildlife, new approaches are needed, to uncover the presence of new emerging PFAS as cyclic- or ether PFAS together with chlorinated PFAS as well as fluorinated organic pesticides and pharmaceuticals.
Elsevier
2022
2022
The influence of photochemistry on outdoor to indoor NO2 in some European museums
This paper reports 1 year of monthly average NO2 indoor to outdoor (I/O) concentrations measured in 10 European museums, and a simple steady-state box model that explains the annual variation. The measurements were performed in the EU FP5 project Master (EVK-CT-2002-00093). The work provides extensive documentation of the annual variation of NO2 I/O concentration ratios, with ratios above unity in the summer, in situations with no indoor emissions of NO2. The modelling included the most relevant production and removal processes of NO2 and showed that the outdoor photolysis was the probable main explanation of the annual trends in the NO2 I/O concentration ratios.
John Wiley & Sons
2022
2022
2022
The aim of this project was to collect, integrate and analyse observations of climate-relevant aerosol parameters (aerosol optical depth (AOD), Ångstrøm exponent (AE), black carbon (BC)) in and around Svalbard. These observations have been performed at different places and with different instrument types, the analysis procedures of which follow different protocols. Annual merged datasets of AOD, AE and BC have been provided to the SIOS Data Management System and are now available for network-wide use in, e.g., Arctic climate and pollution studies. The analysis of the 2002-2020 data have confirmed earlier results showing a good correlation between measurements in Ny-Ålesund and Hornsund, but not a high degree of short-term agreement due to aerosol variability arising from geographical locations and local conditions. There is also a clear link between the columnar AOD/AE-measurements and in-situ aerosol measurements at Gruvebadet Observatory, while a comparison of in-situ measurements at Gruvebadet and Zeppelin Observatory shows deviations varying with season.
NILU
2022
2022
2022
Epidemiological studies have increasingly shown that ambient air pollution is not only associated with mortality but also with the occurrence of a number of long and short-term diseases. Further, the Global Burden of Disease study clearly indicated, that e. g. particulate matter pollution is also associated with a considerable burden of disease related to morbidity effects.
In addition to the most recent EEA’s health risk assessments, this report estimates the morbidity related health burden associated with exposure to the same three key air pollutants: fine particulate matter (PM2.5), nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and ozone (O3). Years lived with disability (YLDs) or attributable hospitalisation cases are assessed for the year 2019 for numerous European countries, depending on the respective data availability. Besides, the methodological approach as well as reviews on evidence-based health outcomes, health data and concentration-response functions are provided.
For the ten considered risk-outcome pairs, the results showed the highest morbidity related burden of disease in Europe for PM2.5 associated with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) with 51.6 YLDs per 100 000 inhabitants ≥25 years. For NO2 the highest morbidity burden resulted from diabetes mellitus (DM) with 54.6 YLDs per 100 000 inhabitants ≥35 years. For short-term O3 exposure hospital admissions due to respiratory diseases were estimated at 18 attributable cases per 100 000 inhabitants ≥65 years.
In addition to the estimates, the report contains suggestions for further sensitivity analyses. These would allow a better assessment of the effects resulting from different input data on the results.
The estimations presented in this report are the first of its kind that are carried out for a wide range of morbidity health outcomes associated with different outdoor air pollutants in Europe, using a consistent methodology and data from European health databases.
ETC/HE
2022
2022
Machine Learning-Based Digital Twin for Predictive Modeling in Wind Turbines
Wind turbines are one of the primary sources of renewable energy, which leads to a sustainable and efficient energy solution. It does not release any carbon emissions to pollute our planet. The wind farms monitoring and power generation prediction is a complex problem due to the unpredictability of wind speed. Consequently, it limits the decision power of the management team to plan the energy consumption in an effective way. Our proposed model solves this challenge by utilizing a 5G-Next Generation-Radio Access Network (5G-NG-RAN) assisted cloud-based digital twins’ framework to virtually monitor wind turbines and form a predictive model to forecast wind speed and predict the generated power. The developed model is based on Microsoft Azure digital twins infrastructure as a 5-dimensional digital twins platform. The predictive modeling is based on a deep learning approach, temporal convolution network (TCN) followed by a non-parametric k-nearest neighbor (kNN) regression. Predictive modeling has two components. First, it processes the univariate time series data of wind to predict its speed. Secondly, it estimates the power generation for each quarter of the year ranges from one week to a whole month (i.e., medium-term prediction) To evaluate the framework the experiments are performed on onshore wind turbines publicly available datasets. The obtained results confirm the applicability of the proposed framework. Furthermore, the comparative analysis with the existing classical prediction models shows that our designed approach obtained better results. The model can assist the management team to monitor the wind farms remotely as well as estimate the power generation in advance.
IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers)
2022
Important clarifications regarding the long-range environmental transport of chemical additives contained in floating plastic debris are presented.
Springer
2022
2022
2022
The atmosphere and cryosphere have recently garnered considerable attention due to their role in transporting microplastics to and within the Arctic, and between freshwater, marine, and terrestrial environments. While investigating either in isolation provides valuable insight on the fate of microplastics in the Arctic, monitoring both provides a more holistic view. Nonetheless, despite the recent scientific interest, fundamental knowledge on microplastic abundance and consistent monitoring efforts are lacking for these compartments. Here, we build upon the work of the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme's Monitoring Guidelines for Litter and Microplastic to provide a roadmap for multicompartment monitoring of the atmosphere and cryosphere to support our understanding of the sources, pathways, and sinks of plastic pollution across the Arctic. Overall, we recommend the use of existing standard techniques for ice and atmospheric sampling and to build upon existing monitoring efforts in the Arctic to obtain a more comprehensive pan-Arctic view of microplastic pollution in these two compartments.
2022
Lack of mutagenicity of TiO2 nanoparticles in vitro despite cellular and nuclear uptake
The potential genotoxicity of titanium dioxide (TiO2) nanoparticles (NPs) is a conflictive topic because both positive and negative findings have been reported. To add clarity, we have carried out a study with two cell lines (V79–4 and A549) to evaluate the effects of TiO2 NPs (NM-101), with a diameter ranging from 15 to 60 nm, at concentrations 1–75 μg/cm2. Using two different dispersion procedures, cell uptake was determined by Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM). Mutagenicity was evaluated using the Hprt gene mutation test, while genotoxicity was determined with the comet assay, detecting both DNA breaks and oxidized DNA bases (with formamidopyrimidine glycosylase - Fpg). Cell internalization, as determined by TEM, shows TiO2 NM-101 in cytoplasmic vesicles, as well as close to and inside the nucleus. Such internalization did not depend on the state of agglomeration, nor the dispersion used. In spite of such internalization, no cytotoxicity was detected in V79–4 cells (relative growth activity and plating efficiency assays) or in A549 cells (AlamarBlue assay) after exposure lasting for 24 h. However, a significant decrease in the relative growth activity was detected at longer exposure times (48 and 72 h) and at the highest concentration 75 µg/cm2. When the modified enzyme-linked alkaline comet assay was performed on A549 cells, although no significant induction of DNA damage was detected, a positive concentration-effects relationship was observed (Spearman’s correlation = 0.9, p 0.0001). Furthermore, no significant increase of DNA oxidized purine bases was observed. When the frequency of Hprt gene mutants was determined in V79–4 cells, no increase was observed in the exposed cells, relative to the unexposed cultures. Our general conclusion is that, under our experimental conditions, TiO2 NM-101 exposure does not exert mutagenic effects despite the evidence of NP uptake by V79–4 cells.
2022
2022