Search

This study reports OCP and PAH concentrations in the tissues of stranded sea snakes from Sharjah, UAE. Samples from 10 Hydrophis lapemoides, 2 Hydrophis ornatus and 1 Hydrophis curtus were analyzed. Muscle, liver and fat tissues were extracted using micro-QuEChERs, followed by d-SPE and analyzed using GC/MS. Higher concentrations of OCPs were detected, while PAHs were more frequently detected. Significant correlations suggest that OCPs and PAHs do bioaccumulate in the tissues of sea snakes. Additionally, OCPs with lower log Kow (octanol-water partition coefficient) values were mainly detected in the muscle samples of H. lapemoides, whereas OCPs with higher log Kow values were more commonly present in the liver and fat samples. The concentrations of OCPs reported in this study were higher than those previously documented in other marine reptiles in the UAE or sea snakes from different geographical regions., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Copyright © 2024 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Polychlorinated dibenzofurans (PCDFs) are persistent toxic compounds that are ubiquitous in the environment. Nanocomposites of titanium(IV) oxide-vanadium(III) oxide (Ti3V2O7) and titanium(IV) oxide-silicon dioxide (Ti2Si7O30) were prepared and spectroscopically analyzed as potential decontaminants for dioxin-like materials. The analysis confirmed a homogeneous morphology with nanoscale particle size. The Ti-Si sample was found to have a high surface area compared to the Ti-V composite. Vanadium(III) oxide (V 2 O 5 ) and silicon dioxide (SiO 2 ) were chosen as materials for the formation of heterogeneous compounds with titanium(IV) oxide (TiO 2 ) because they possess a suitable band alignment with TiO 2, thus forming effective photocatalysts. This study evaluated the photodegradation of 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo-furan (TCDF) in the presence of Ti-Si and Ti-V oxide composites, which was tested using high- (254 nm) and midenergy (302 nm) UV irradiation sources. While Ti-Si showed success in the photodegradation of 2,3,7,8-TCDF dissolved in a (1:1) methanol-tetrahydrofuran (MeOH-THF) solution, the Ti-V composite proved to be a powerful material in adsorbing TCDF with a high capacity immediately upon mixing. Ti-Si oxide was found to decompose TCDF under the two irradiation sources with 98-99% degradation occurring after 70 min. The use of 254 nm as an irradiation source in the presence of Ti-Si was 4.3 times faster than the analogue reaction irradiated without a catalyst. Byproducts of the degradation were evaluated using gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS), resulting in a lower chlorinated congener and less toxicity, as the main degradation product., Competing Interests: The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Vigilance level assessment is of prime importance to avoid life-threatening human error. Critical working environments such as air traffic control, driving, or military surveillance require the operator to be alert the whole time. The electroencephalogram (EEG) is a very common modality that can be used in assessing vigilance. Unfortunately, EEG signals are prone to artifacts due to eye movement, muscle contraction, and electrical noise. Mitigating these artifacts is important for an accurate vigilance level assessment. Independent Component Analysis (ICA) is an effective method and has been extensively used in the suppression of EEG artifacts. However, in vigilance assessment applications, it was found to suffer from leakage of the cerebral activity into artifacts. In this work, we show that the wavelet ICA (wICA) method provides an alternative for artifact reduction, leading to improved vigilance level assessment results. We conducted an experiment in nine human subjects to induce two vigilance states, alert and vigilance decrement, while performing a Stroop Color-Word Test for approximately 45 min. We then compared the performance of the ICA and wICA preprocessing methods using five classifiers. Our classification results showed that in terms of features extraction, the wICA method outperformed the existing ICA method. In the delta, theta, and alpha bands, we obtained a mean classification accuracy of 84.66% using the ICA method, whereas the mean accuracy using the wICA methodwas 96.9%. However, no significant improvement was observed in the beta band. In addition, we compared the topographical map to show the changes in power spectral density across the brain regions for the two vigilance states. The proposed method showed that the frontal and central regions were most sensitive to vigilance decrement. However, in this application, the proposed wICA shows a marginal improvement compared to the Fast-ICA.

Hookah (waterpipe) smoking is a very common practice that has spread globally. There is growing evidence on the hazardous consequences of smoking hookah, with studies indicating that its harmful effects are comparable to cigarette smoking if not worse. Charcoal is commonly used as a heating source for hookah smoke. Although charcoal briquettes are thought to be one of the major contributors to toxicity, their composition and impact on the smoke generated remains largely unidentified. This study aims to analyze the elemental composition of five different raw synthetic and natural charcoals by using Carbon-Hydrogen-Nitrogen (CHN) analysis, inductively coupled plasma (ICP), and scanning electron microscopy coupled with energy dispersive X-Ray spectrometry (SEM-EDS). Elemental analysis showed that the raw charcoals contain heavy metals such as zinc, iron, cadmium, vanadium, aluminum, lead, chromium, manganese and cobalt at concentrations similar, if not higher than, cigarettes. In addition, thermal desorption-gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (TD-GC-MS) was used to analyze the chemical composition of the smoke produced from burning the charcoal samples. The smoke emitted from charcoal was found to be the source of numerous compounds which could be hazardous to health. A total of seven carcinogens, 39 central nervous system depressants and 31 respiratory irritants were identified., (Copyright © 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Two samples of silver doped into zeolite Y were prepared and characterized. ICP and SEM-EDS analysis indicate that the AgY1 sample contains twice the amount of silver compared to the AgY2 sample. Solid state luminescence spectroscopy shows variations in the emission modes of the site-selective luminescence where various luminophores might be excited upon selecting the proper excitation energy. The selected material effectively decomposed the pesticide fenoxycarb in aqueous solution. The photodecomposition of fenoxycarb reached 80 % upon irradiation for 60 min in the presence of the AgY1 catalyst. 2-(4-Phenoxy-phenoxy)ethyl] carbamic acid (1) and 1-amine-2-(phenoxy-4-ol) ethane (2) were identified as products for both uncatalyzed solution and the catalyzed fenoxycarb with AgY2 catalyst. Whereas, compound (2) was the only product identified in the catalyzed reaction with AgY1.