Pesticide removal from waste spray-tank water by organoclay adsorption after field application: an approach for a formulation of cyprodinil containing antifoaming/defoaming agents

Purpose  

Many reports on purification of water containing pesticides are based on studies using unformulated active ingredients. However, most commercial formulations contain additives/adjuvants or are manufactured using microencapsulation which may influence the purification process. Therefore, the main objective of this work was to develop and test a pilot scheme for decontaminating water containing pesticides formulated with antifoaming/defoaming agents.     

Decomposition of benzo (a) pyrene deposited on glass fiber filters and exposed to sunlight

Measurements of Benzo (a) Pyrene deposited on glass fiber filters exposed to solar radiation indicate a time dependent exponential decrease. Possible impl$\text{i}$ cations of this phenomenon in the measurements of B(a)P in particulate samples are discussed.     

Modeling Inorganic Aerosols and Their Response to Changes in Precursor Concentration in Mexico City

Abstract

Based on data from the 1997 Investigación sobre Materia Particulada y Deterioro Atmosférico-Aerosol and Visibility Evaluation Research (IMADA-EVER) campaign and the inorganic aerosol model ISORROPIA, the response of inorganic aerosols to changes in precursor concentrations was calculated. The aerosol behavior is dominated by the abundance of ammonia and thus, changes in ammonia concentration are expected to have a small effect on particle concentrations. Changes in sulfate and nitrate are expected to lead to proportional reductions in inorganic fine particulate matter (PM_2.5). Comparing the predictions of ISORROPIA with the observations, the lowest bias and error are achieved when the aerosols are assumed to be in the efflorescence branch. Including crustal species reduces the bias and error for nitrate but does not improve overall model performance. The estimated response of inorganic PM_2.5 to changes in precursor concentrations is affected by the inclusion of crustal species in some cases, although average responses are comparable with and without crustal species. Observed concentrations of particle chloride suggest that gas phase concentrations of hydrogen chloride may not be negligible, and future measurement campaigns should include observations to test this hypothesis. Our ability to model aerosol behavior in Mexico City and, thus, design control strategies, is constrained primarily by a lack of observations of gas phase precursors. Future campaigns should focus in particular on better understanding the temporal and spatial distribution of ammonia concentrations. In addition, gas phase observations of nitric acid are needed, and a measure of particle water content will allow stable versus metastable aerosol behavior to be distinguished.     

2014, The “year without a summer” in Italy: news media coverage and implications for the climate change debate

In 2014, there was virtually no summer in northern and central-southern Italy. Storm after storm battered the peninsula, triggering floods and landslides from Veneto to Puglia. We studied the coverage of “the year without a summer” in Italy by analyzing the content of 171 news articles from two influential online newspapers. Our software-based analysis enabled us to observe that the two newspapers hardly ever mentioned climate change in their coverage of the weather anomaly that affected Italy in the summer of 2014. This type of coverage is in line with climate science, according to which there is no evidence of a climate change-related influence on summer precipitation patterns in Southern Europe—whereas such influence has been documented for northern Europe. We compared our results with a recent paper, which documented that the same online dailies chose to represent the particularly hot summer of 2012 in Italy as a direct consequence of climate change. We corroborated this comparison also on the basis of a preliminary analysis we performed on the media coverage of the exceptionally hot and arid summer of 2015 in Italy.     

Developing sinks for CO<Subscript>2</Subscript> through forestation of temperate coastal barriers: an environmental business

Since the 1940s, some sectors of the sand dune barriers of Buenos Aires Province have been forested to fix the sand in the neighborhoods of resort villages. Man took advantage of the maritime climate and the shallow groundwater to introduce pine forests. Today, these forests reach more than 20 m in height and have developed soils of more than 0.05 m in thickness on former arid sands. Field data were referred to Landsat (TM) composite and Normalized Difference of Vegetation Index, NDVI, images to calculate forest density and covered area. Considering published tables of wood density for each species, the amount of total carbon storage was estimated on 318 t C ha^-1 (Mg=10⁶ g) in biomass and 86 t C ha^-1 in soils. The three areas analyzed at Miramar, Necochea and Claromecó have captured 658,868 t of carbon in the last 50 years. It is estimated that 150,000,000 t C could be sequestered within temperate dune barriers of Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil. Besides this ecological point of view, there is an important socio-economic factor that cannot be excluded.Presented at and revised subsequent to the 4th LOICZ Open Science Meeting, Bahía Blanca, Argentina. October 1999.     

Ultrasonographic features in a case of heterozygous achondroplasia at 25 weeks' gestation

Prenatal diagnosis of heterozygous achondroplasia at 25 weeks is described. First-level fetal ultrasonography demonstrated short long bones of the lower limbs. Second-level examination showed a large head; shortened femur, fibula, and tibia; a ‘trident’-shaped hand; and an abnormal facial profile.