A stochastic model of the chemical enrichment of metal-poor systems by core collapse supernovae is used to study the scatter in stellar abundance ratios. Large-scale mixing of the enriched material by turbulent motions and cloud collisions in the interstellar medium, and infall of pristine matter are taken into account. The resulting scatter in abundance ratios, e.g. as functions of the overall...

-The conditions under which an exchanger phase will behave as an ideal mixture are established from thermodynamic principles. It is shown that, if a stoichiometric cation-exchange reaction is reversible, the exchanger phase will exhibit ideal behavior if the Vanselow selectivity coefficient is independent of the exchanger composition. This criterion is applied to some recently published data fo...

A novel enrichment technique, adsorptive μ-extraction (AμE), is proposed for trace analysis of polar solutes in aqueous media. The preparation, stability tests and development of the analytical devices using two geometrical configurations, i.e. bar adsorptive μ-extraction (BAμE) and multi-spheres adsorptive μ-extraction (MSAμE) is fully discussed. From the several sorbent materials tested, acti...

The effects of trace metal contaminants (lead, cadmium, and mercury) on the immunologic responses of rats infected with Trypanosoma lewisi were investigated to determine whether chronic exposures to subclinical levels of these metals have adverse effects on the host's ability to respond to an infective agent.Earlier and higher levels of parasitemia were detected in animals exposed to cadmium, l...

I demonstrate by means of high resolution cosmological simulations, which include modelling of a two-phase interstellar medium, that the dominant mechanism for transporting heavy elements from the proto-galaxies into the IGM is the merger mechanism as discovered by Gnedin & Ostriker. Direct ejection of the interstellar gas by supernovae plays only a minor role in transporting metals into the IG...

Because of the scientific evidence showing that arsenic (As), cadmium (Cd), and nickel (Ni) are human genotoxic carcinogens, the European Union (EU) recently set target values for metal concentration in ambient air (As: 6 ng/m(3), Cd: 5 ng/m(3), Ni: 20 ng/m(3)). The aim of our study was to determine the concentration levels of these trace elements in Porto Metropolitan Area (PMA) in order to as...

This study presents the first laboratory-controlled sea-ice growth experiment conducted under trace metal clean conditions. The role played by organic matter in the incorporation of iron (Fe) into sea ice was investigated by means of laboratory ice-growth experiments using a titanium cold-finger apparatus. Experiments were also conducted to understand the role of extracellular polymeric substan...