Protection of the quality and integrity of food supplies is of global concern. Crops can accumulate non-nutritive and sometimes toxic metals and metalloids. Accumulated metals/metalloids can come in part, from fertilizers, which may contain variable levels of non-nutritive metals or metalloids such as arsenic (As), cadmium (Cd), lead (Pb), nickel...
The XEPHWICH system is a phoswich type (multiple scintillator) radiation
detector designed to detect several radioxenon isotopes with the goal of identifying covert
nuclear explosions. The XEPHWICH system is designed with the sole purpose of
replacing the Automated Radio-xenon Sampler/Analyzer (ARSA) in the United Nation's
(UN) Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty's...
Biological agents and their products commonly cause foodborne illnesses. In the United States it is estimated that there are over 76 million cases of foodborne illnesses each year, resulting in an economic loss of approximately $40 billion. These high figures demonstrate the need for bioassays that display a rapid and...
Former industrial or commercial sites that have been left unused are typically referred to as brownfield sites, or simply, brownfields. Many communities have such properties that are abandoned, idle or underused. Despite public efforts to facilitate brownfields revitalization projects, the rate of remediation remains unexpectedly slow. Efforts to resolve this...
Mercury and arsenic are known developmental toxicants and environmental exposures are ubiquitous worldwide from natural and anthropogenic sources. Prenatal exposure to both contaminants are independently associated with adverse perinatal health outcomes and latent disease risk that could be in part mediated by epigenetic reprogramming events. Fetal programming events involving DNA...
This study focuses on iodine-131 detected in milk samples from the Dairy Science Unit at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, California following events at the Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Plant in March of 2011. The samples were collected as part of the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant (DCPP) Radiological Environmental...
The purposes of this study were to assess mental
health counselors' knowledge of AIDS and to determine the
effect of various independent variables upon knowledge. The
variables used were gender, professional contact with PWAs,
personal contact with PWAs, age, sexual preference, AIDS
training, and personal acquaintance with a person who...
Wastewater epidemiology is an emerging discipline that requires collaborative research involving analytical chemists, drug epidemiologists, and wastewater engineers. Wastewater epidemiology involves the sampling and quantitative analysis of raw wastewaters from communities for illicit drugs and their metabolites. Mass loads (mass per day) and per capita (mg per day per person)...
microRNAs (miRNAs), ~21-24 nucleotide-long RNAs that post-transcriptionally regulate gene expression, have rapidly become one of the most extensively studied mechanisms of the past decade. Since their discovery as temporal regulators of post-embryonic development in C. elegans, miRNAs have been functionally implicated in almost every cellular process investigated to date. miRNAs...
Two epidemiological studies, designed to expand our knowledge of morbidity and
mortality indicators concerning malaria and Bacillus Calmette-Guerin vaccination in the
Hospital Albert Schweitzer health district located in Central Haiti's Artibonite Valley, are
presented. The hospital serves a rural population of 190,000 in its 610 square mile
district. A large...