Because of increasing interest in carotenoid pigments, we conducted a study of the methods of determining carotenoids in serum. We found 1 mol of KOH per liter of absolute methanol to be the most effective saponifying solution. The absorbance of beta-carotene in petroleum ether, the extraction solvent, is proportional to dilution up to an absorbance of 0.85 at 450 nm. Beta-carotene in petroleum...

Chemically modifying vegetable oils to produce an alternative to petroleum-based materials is one of the most important emerging industrial research areas today because of the adverse effects of petroleum products on the environment and the shortage of petroleum resources. Biolubricants, bioplasticizers, non-isocyanate polyurethanes, biofuel, coating materials, biocomposites, and other value-ad...

Remediation of soils contaminated with petroleum is a challenging task. Four different bioremediation strategies, including natural attenuation, biochar amendment, phytoremediation with ryegrass, and a combination of biochar and ryegrass, were investigated with greenhouse pot experiments over a 90-day period. The results showed that planting ryegrass in soil can significantly improve the remova...

Bacteria able to produce biosurfactants can use petroleum-based hydrocarbons as a carbon source. Herein, four biosurfactant-producing Pseudomonas aeruginosa strains, isolated from oil-contaminated saline soil, were combined to form a bacterial consortium. The inoculation of the consortium to contaminated soil alleviated the adverse effects of salinity on biodegradation and increased the rate of...

Upper Jurassic and Lower Cretaceous bashal strata are preserved in a discontinuous belt along the inboard margin of the Alexander-WrangelliaPeninsular terrane (AWP) in Alaska and western Canada, on the outboard margin of terranes in the Canadian Cordillera accreted to North America prior to Late Jurassic time, and along the Cordilleran margin from southern Oregon to southern California. Nearly ...

In this paper, we present an alarm management system focused on guiding offshore platform operators’ attention to the essential information that calls for immediate action during emergency situations. Due to the imminent associated danger involved in the petroleum operation domain, only well trained workers are allowed to operate in offshore oil process plants. Although their vast experience, h...

The Peirópolis paleontological site (Late Cretaceous, Maastrichtian) in Minas Gerais State, Brazil yielded an important assemblage of fossil vertebrates. The typical occurrence of South American widespread taxa in Peirópolis is important for correlation between the Brazilian Bauru Basin and Argentinean Late Cretaceous basins. The fishes, turtles, anuran, crocodilians and dinosaurs known from Pe...

Testing models of macroevolution, and especially the sufficiency of microevolutionary processes, requires good collaboration between molecular biologists and paleontologists. We report such a test for events around the Late Cretaceous by describing the earliest penguin fossils, analyzing complete mitochondrial genomes from an albatross, a petrel, and a loon, and describe the gradual decline of ...

The subject of petroleum storage tank fires has gained a great deal of attention due to the high cost of petroleum, and the consequent disruption of petroleum production; therefore, much of the current research has focused on petroleum storage tank fires. Also, the number of petroleum tank fires is oscillating between 15 and 20 fires per year. About 33% of all tank fires are attributed to light...