Recent research on mental contamination (internal, psychological feelings of dirtiness) has focused primarily on examining the experimental variables necessary to provoke contamination-related thoughts, feelings and behaviour; yet, relatively little is known regarding the individual differences among participants' mental contamination responses to these situational and experimental characterist...

Background The Sediment Quality Objectives (SQO) indirect effects assessment determines whether sediments meet California’s narrative SQO for human health: Pollutants shall not be present in sediments at levels that will bioaccumulate in aquatic life to levels that are harmful to human health. This program determines whether sediment contamination at a site results in an unacceptable health ris...

Water quality data collection in shallow water areas can be a challenging task. Obstacles encountered in such environments include difficulty in covering large territories and the presence of inaccessible areas due to a variety of reasons such as a soft bottom or contamination. There is also a high probability of disturbing the test area while placing the sensors. This paper describes a NASA-fu...

Atrazine has been identified in at least 20 of the 1,636 hazardous waste sites that have been proposed for inclusion on the EPA National Priorities List (NPL) (HazDat 2003). However, the number of sites evaluated for atrazine is not known. The frequency for these sites within the United States can be seen in Figure 6-1. Of these sites, all 20 are located within the United States and none are lo...

Hydrophobic sand is a relatively new method of urine collection in the rodent, comparable to the established method using a metabolic cage. Urine samples are often used in rodent research, especially for biomarkers of health changes after internal contamination from embedded metals, such as in a model of a military shrapnel wound. However, little research has been done on the potential interfer...

We investigate the performance of robust estimates of multivariate location under nonstandard data contamination models such as componentwise outliers (i.e., contamination in each variable is independent from the other variables). This model brings up a possible new source of statistical error that we call “propagation of outliers.” This source of error is unusual in the sense that it is genera...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to describe the development of a comprehensive categorisation of food scares. Design/methodology/approach – Following an initial desktop study, the categorisation was developed collaboratively with industry experts through a workshop and series of semi-structured interviews. Findings – The new categorisation developed is in Venn diagram format allowing ove...

Contamination of groundwaters with geogenic arsenic poses a major health risk to millions of people. Although the main geochemical mechanisms of arsenic mobilization are well understood, the worldwide scale of affected regions is still unknown. In this study we used a large database of measured arsenic concentration in groundwaters (around 20,000 data points) from around the world as well as di...

A method is described for direct analysis of lead in blood utilizing the carbon rod atomizer. Aliquots of whole blood are analyzed without pre-treatment. Resuits are comparable to those for a similar non-flame technique in which whole blood samples were prediluted with “Triton X-100.” The small sample volumes required and the minimal sample preparation further diminish the possibility of spurio...