Understanding the role of land use in urban stormwater quality management.

Urbanisation significantly impacts water environments with increased runoff and the degradation of water quality. The management of quantity impacts are straight forward, but quality impacts are far more complex. Current approaches to safeguard water quality are largely ineffective and guided by entrenched misconceptions with a primary focus on 'end-of-pipe' solutions.

Application of multicriteria decision making methods to air quality in the microenvironments of residential houses in Brisbane, Australia.

This paper reports the first application of the multicriteria decision making methods, PROMETHEE and GAIA, to indoor and outdoor air quality data. Fourteen residential houses in a suburb of Brisbane, Australia were investigated for 21 air quality-influencing criteria, which included the characteristics of the houses as well as the concentrations of volatile organic compounds, fungi, bacteria, submicrometer, and supermicrometer particles in their indoor and outdoor air samples. Ranking information necessary to select one house in preference to all others and to assess the parameters influencing the differentiation of the houses was found with the aid of PROMETHEE and GAIA.

A pilot investigation into associations between indoor airborne fungal and non-biological particle concentrations in residential houses in Brisbane, Australia.

Indoor air contains a complex mixture of bioaerosols such as fungi, bacteria and allergens, as well as non-biological particles including products from various combustion processes. To date little work has been done to investigate the interactions and associations between particles of biological and non-biological origin, however, any occurring interactions could affect pollutant behaviour in the air and ultimately the effect they have on health. The aim of this work was to examine associations between the concentration levels of airborne particles and fungi measured in 14 residential suburban houses in Brisbane.

Novel germline CDH1 mutations in hereditary diffuse gastric cancer families.

Hereditary diffuse gastric cancer (HDGC) is a recently defined cancer syndrome caused by inactivating, heterozygous germline mutations in the gene for the cell-to-cell adhesion protein E-cadherin (CDH1). Here, we describe the search for CDH1 mutations in 10 newly identified gastric cancer families. Seven of 10 families met the clinical criteria for HDGC.