High Amounts of Halogenated Natural Products in Sperm Whales () from Two Italian Regions in the Mediterranean Sea.

Halogenated natural products (HNPs) are considered to be emerging contaminants whose environmental distribution and fate are only incompletely known. Therefore, several persistent and bioaccumulative HNP groups, together with man-made polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs), were quantified in the blubber of nine sperm whales () stranded on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea in Italy. The naturally occurring polybrominated hexahydroxanthene derivatives (PBHDs; sum of TetraBHD and TriBHD) were the most prominent substance class with up to 77,000 ng/g blubber.

Intersystem Crossing Rates in Photoexcited Rose Bengal: Solvation versus Isolation.

We compare the intersystem crossing rate, , of Rose Bengal (RB) in an aqueous pH 12 solution with the corresponding relaxation rates of four different RB-derived anion and dianion species isolated in the gas phase: the doubly deprotonated dianion ([RB-2H]), the singly deprotonated monoanion ([RB-H]), and the corresponding singly negatively charged sodium and cesium adducts ([RB-2H + Na] and [RB-2H + Cs], respectively). Each of them was probed following photoexcitation of their first singlet excited states (S) at or near room temperature. The solution was studied by transient absorption spectroscopy, whereas the mass-selected anions were characterized by time-resolved photoelectron spectroscopy─all with ca.

Nanoscale patterning at the Si/SiO/graphene interface by focused He beam.

We have studied the capability of He focused ion beam (He-FIB) patterning to fabricate defect arrays on the Si/SiO/Graphene interface using a combination of atomic force microscopy (AFM) and Raman imaging to probe damage zones. In general, an amorphized 'blister' region of cylindrical symmetry results upon exposing the surface to the stationary focused He beam. The topography of the amorphized region depends strongly on the ion dose, D , (ranging from 10 to 10ions/spot) with craters and holes observed at higher doses.

A TPD-based determination of the graphite interlayer cohesion energy.

Temperature Programmed Desorption (TPD) spectroscopy was used to determine the binding energies of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons C H (22 ≤ ≤ 60) with highly oriented pyrolytic graphite. These energies were then used to estimate the dispersive graphite interlayer cohesion by means of a refined extrapolation method proposed by Björk This yields a cohesion energy of 44.0 ± 3.