Stability, preservation and storage of As(iii), DMA, MMA and As(v) in water samples.

Correct handling and preservation of water samples is crucial to ensure their integrity for arsenic speciation measurements. ISO TS 19620:2018 is a method for the determination of arsenic(iii) and arsenic(v) species in waters by liquid chromatography (LC) coupled to inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) or hydride generation atomic fluorescence spectrometry (HG-AFS). During the development of this method, a study was performed to establish the best practices for storage and preservation of samples to maintain the integrity of the arsenic speciation and stability.

Learning to predict: exposure to temporal sequences facilitates prediction of future events.

Previous experience is thought to facilitate our ability to extract spatial and temporal regularities from cluttered scenes. However, little is known about how we may use this knowledge to predict future events. Here we test whether exposure to temporal sequences facilitates the visual recognition of upcoming stimuli.

Strategies to increase influenza vaccination rates: outcomes of a nationwide cross-sectional survey of UK general practice.

Objective: To identify practice strategies associated with higher flu vaccination rates in primary care.

Design: Logistic regression analysis of data from a cross-sectional online questionnaire.

Setting: 795 general practices across England.

Field comparison of manual and semi-automatic methods for the measurement of total gaseous mercury in ambient air and assessment of equivalence.

The manual and semi-automatic methods for the measurement of total gaseous mercury in ambient air have been compared in a field trial for the first time. The comparison results have shown that whilst the expected random scatter is present, there was no significant systematic bias between the two methods, whose operational differences have also been outlined and analysed in this work. Furthermore it has been observed that because variation in instrument sensitivity is largely random in nature there is little effect on the results of the comparison if the period between instrument calibrations is altered.