Publications by authors named "B R Schulze"
Comprehensive characterization of European house dust contaminants: Concentrations and profiles, geographical variability, and implications for chemical regulation and health risk.
Sci Total Environ
December 2024
Article Synopsis
- - This study explores the levels and geographical differences of contaminants found in house dust across Europe, identifying over 1200 anthropogenic compounds using advanced techniques like mass spectrometry and suspect screening.
- - The research indicates that contaminant concentrations vary less than threefold within Europe, showing similarities with North American dust due to shared consumer products and materials.
- - It highlights geographical patterns, revealing that certain contaminants increased from north to south (like PAHs and chlorinated paraffins), whereas others, like biocides, decreased; it also emphasizes a significant risk from older, restricted contaminants, like DEHP and PCBs, despite limited toxicity data available for newer compounds.
This study describes a modeling framework, model evaluation, and source apportionment to understand the causes of Los Angeles (LA) air pollution. A few major updates are applied to the Community Multiscale Air Quality (CMAQ) model with a high spatial resolution (1 km × 1 km). The updates include dynamic traffic emissions based on real-time, on-road information and recent emission factors and secondary organic aerosol (SOA) schemes to represent volatile chemical products (VCPs).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNontargeted screening (NTS) utilizing liquid chromatography electrospray ionization high-resolution mass spectrometry (LC/ESI/HRMS) is increasingly used to identify environmental contaminants. Major differences in the ionization efficiency of compounds in ESI/HRMS result in widely varying responses and complicate quantitative analysis. Despite an increasing number of methods for quantification without authentic standards in NTS, the approaches are evaluated on limited and diverse data sets with varying chemical coverage collected on different instruments, complicating an unbiased comparison.
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- The decline in vehicle emissions highlights the increasing role of Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) from Volatile Chemical Products (VCP), but their complex chemistry poses challenges for accurate modeling.
- Researchers developed a new chemical mechanism called RACM2B-VCP to better represent VOC emissions from VCP sources, specifically in urban settings like Los Angeles.
- Model evaluations show promising results, indicating that over 50% of anthropogenic VOC reactivity and ozone enhancement in the area is linked to VCP emissions, despite some remaining discrepancies in the model's overall VOC reactivity predictions.
Introduction: Chronic stress can cause an imbalance within the autonomic nervous system, thereby affecting cardiovascular and mental health. Physical activity (PA) may have a positive effect on the autonomic nervous system and stress-related disorders, such as depression and burnout. Heart rate variability (HRV) is a non-invasive marker of the autonomic nervous system.
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