Publications by authors named "Schulze B"

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.
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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).

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Nontargeted 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.
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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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  • Despite progress in reducing transportation emissions, urban areas in North America and Europe still deal with poor air quality, revealing new insights about sources of volatile organic compounds (VOCs).
  • Research in summer Los Angeles shows that biogenic terpenoids account for about 60% of VOC emissions affecting ozone and aerosol formation, with their impact rising with higher temperatures.
  • To effectively combat air pollution, especially ozone, it's crucial to control nitrogen oxides, as climate change will significantly alter both the quantity and type of VOC emissions.
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Monitoring contamination from per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFASs) in water systems impacted by aqueous film-forming foams (AFFFs) typically addresses a few known PFAS groups. Given the diversity of PFASs present in AFFFs, current analytical approaches do not comprehensively address the range of PFASs present in these systems. A suspect-screening and nontarget analysis (NTA) approach was developed and applied to identify novel PFASs in groundwater samples contaminated from historic AFFF use.

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The main nucleating vapor in the atmosphere is thought to be sulfuric acid (HSO), stabilized by ammonia (NH). However, in marine and polar regions, NH is generally low, and HSO is frequently found together with iodine oxoacids [HIO, i.e.

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The use of peak-picking algorithms is an essential step in all nontarget analysis (NTA) workflows. However, algorithm choice may influence reliability and reproducibility of results. Using a real-world data set, the aim of this study was to investigate how different peak-picking algorithms influence NTA results when exploring temporal and/or spatial trends.

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State inventories indicate that dairy operations account for nearly half of California's methane budget. Recent analyses suggest, however, that these emissions may be underestimated, complicating efforts to develop emission reduction strategies. Here, we report estimates of dairy methane emissions in the southern San Joaquin Valley (SJV) of California in June 2021 using airborne flux measurements.

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Non-target analysis (NTA) using high-resolution mass spectrometry is becoming a useful approach to screen for suspect and unknown chemicals. For comprehensive analyses, data-independent acquisition (DIA), like Sequential Windowed Acquisition of all THeoretical Mass Spectra (SWATH-MS) on Sciex instruments, is necessary, usually followed by library matching for feature annotation. The choice of parameters, such as acquisition window number and size, may influence the comprehensiveness of the suspect features detected.

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Article Synopsis
  • Los Angeles experiences significant air pollution from ozone and particulate matter, which hasn't improved much over the last ten years despite reduced emissions from vehicles.
  • Recent airborne measurements revealed a complex mix of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in the area, with ethanol and terpenoids being the most prevalent sources.
  • Comparing these measurements with existing emission inventories highlighted inconsistencies in the data, especially concerning biogenic and volatile chemical product emissions, while transportation-related VOCs showed better alignment.
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As Europe's second longest river, the Danube is an important water source for drinking water and irrigation for many countries, before discharging into the Black Sea in the East. Per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) have been observed over the last two decades in concentrations exceeding the European Union's drinking water guidelines for total sum of 20 select PFAS of 0.1 μg L.

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Portal hypertensive colopathy (PHC) is a colonic phenomenon commonly causing chronic gastrointestinal bleeding or less commonly a life-threatening acute colonic hemorrhage. An otherwise well, 58-year-old female presents general surgeons a diagnostic dilemma for symptomatic anemia. An interesting case where the rare and elusive PHC was diagnosed on colonoscopy, which led to the diagnosis of liver cirrhosis without evidence of oesophageal varices.

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Changes in the DNA methylation landscape are associated with many diseases like cancer. Therefore, DNA methylation analysis is of great interest for molecular diagnostics and can be applied, e.g.

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New particle formation in the upper free troposphere is a major global source of cloud condensation nuclei (CCN). However, the precursor vapours that drive the process are not well understood. With experiments performed under upper tropospheric conditions in the CERN CLOUD chamber, we show that nitric acid, sulfuric acid and ammonia form particles synergistically, at rates that are orders of magnitude faster than those from any two of the three components.

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The population of Texas has increased rapidly in the past decade. The San Antonio Field Study (SAFS) was designed to investigate ozone (O) production and precursors in this rapidly changing, sprawling metropolitan area. There are still many questions regarding the sources and chemistry of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in urban areas like San Antonio which are affected by a complex mixture of industry, traffic, biogenic sources and transported pollutants.

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Article Synopsis
  • PLK4 is a crucial protein for processes such as centriole duplication and spindle assembly, with mutations linked to serious conditions like primary microcephaly and aneuploidy.
  • A study on a four-generation family found that 8 members carried a new variant and a gene deletion of PLK4, showing milder symptoms than other documented mutations.
  • The findings suggest that a reduced expression of PLK4 may enhance the survival of embryos through early cell divisions, leading to a higher rate of transmission for the deleterious alleles among offspring.
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Acute scrotal pain is a very common presentation to the emergency room. The most important pathology we must exclude is testicular infarction or testicular ischemia. Here we describe two rare cases of acute scrotum where incarcerated inguinal hernias containing omentum resulted in testicular ischemia/infarction.

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Underwater light is spatially as well as temporally variable and directly affects phytoplankton growth and competition. Here we systematically (following the guidelines of PRISMA-EcoEvo) searched and screened the published literature resulting in 640 individual articles. We mapped the conducted research for the objectives of (1) phytoplankton fundamental responses to light, (2) effects of light on the competition between phytoplankton species, and (3) effects of climate-change-induced changes in the light availability in aquatic ecosystems.

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  • * A study analyzed 500 pregnancies with fetal ultrasound abnormalities between 2018 and 2020, finding genetic explanations for 38% of cases, including many new, disease-causing variants.
  • * Trio exome sequencing shows high diagnostic yield and quick results, making it a valuable tool in prenatal diagnostics, highlighting the need for thorough counseling throughout the process.
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We present a 67-year-old gentleman with a high perioperative mortality and morbidity risk who presented with spontaneous idiopathic tension pneumoperitoneum that was successfully managed with bedside pig-tail catheter insertion. Here we also discuss other potential non-surgical aetiologies of pneumoperitoneum.

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Non-target analysis (NTA) employing high-resolution mass spectrometry is a commonly applied approach for the detection of novel chemicals of emerging concern in complex environmental samples. NTA typically results in large and information-rich datasets that require computer aided (ideally automated) strategies for their processing and interpretation. Such strategies do however raise the challenge of reproducibility between and within different processing workflows.

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Article Synopsis
  • - Iodic acid (HIO) can rapidly form aerosol particles in coastal areas, with nucleation rates surpassing those of sulfuric acid-ammonia under similar conditions.
  • - Ion-induced nucleation involves the initial formation of IO followed by the addition of HIO, occurring efficiently at temperatures below +10°C, while neutral nucleation relies on a different process involving iodous acid.
  • - Freshly formed HIO particles significantly contribute to fast particle growth and can effectively compete with sulfuric acid particle formation in unpolluted atmospheric regions.
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