This article provides a detailed discussion of the evidence available to date on the application of laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) and supervised classification methods for the individual reassignment of commingled bone remains. Specialized bone chemistry studies have demonstrated the suitability of bone elemental composition as a distinct individual identifier. Given the widely documented ability of the LIBS technique to provide elemental emission spectra that are considered elemental fingerprints of the samples analyzed, the analytical potential of this technique has been assessed for the investigation of the contexts of commingled bone remains for their individual reassignment.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFScientific evidence sustains PM particles' inhalation may generate harmful impacts on human beings' health; therefore, their monitoring in ambient air is of paramount relevance in terms of public health. Due to the limited number of fixed stations within the air quality monitoring networks, development of methodological frameworks to model ambient air PM particles is primordial to providing additional information on PM exposure and its trends. In this sense, this work aims to offer a global easily-applicable tool to estimate ambient air PM as a function of meteorological conditions using a multivariate analysis.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBull Environ Contam Toxicol
December 2023
The aim of this study is to assess and identify the most suitable geospatial interpolation algorithm for environmental sciences. The research focuses on evaluating six different interpolation methods using annual average PM concentrations as a reference dataset. The dataset includes measurements obtained from a target air quality network (scenery 1) and a sub-dataset derived from a partitive clustering technique (scenery 2).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe European Union Publications Office has recently presented a report on the European Union's coordinated action with the Joint Research Centre to determine certain fraudulent practices in the honey sector, in which it has been indicated that 74% of the samples analyzed, imported from China, and 93% of the samples analyzed, imported from Turkey, the two largest honey producers worldwide, presented at least one indicator of exogenous sugar or suspicion of being adulterated. This situation has revealed the critical state of the problem of honey adulteration worldwide and the need to develop analytical techniques for its detection. Even though the adulteration of honey is carried out in a general way with sweetened syrups derived from C4 plants, recent studies have indicated the emerging use of syrups derived from C3 plants for the adulteration of honey.
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