•We assessed the risk by input of UV filters into marine recreational waters.•UV filter concentrations measured in beach water ranged between 35 and 164ngL−1.•4-MBC and BP-3 toxicity thresholds to ...marine organisms were 4–5μgL−1.•EHMC and BP-4 were less toxic.•There is a potential risk to coastal environment for UV filters BP-3 and 4-MBC.
Due to the concern about the negative effects of exposure to sunlight, combinations of UV filters like 4-Methylbenzylidene-camphor (4-MBC), Benzophenone-3 (BP-3), Benzophenone-4 (BP-4) and 2-Ethylhexyl-4-methoxycinnamate (EHMC) are being introduced in all kind of cosmetic formulas. These chemicals are acquiring a concerning status due to their increasingly common use and the potential risk for the environment. The aim of this study is to assess the behaviour of these compounds in seawater, the toxicity to marine organisms from three trophic levels including autotrophs (Isochrysis galbana), herbivores (Mytilus galloprovincialis and Paracentrotus lividus) and carnivores (Siriella armata), and set a preliminary assessment of potential ecological risk of UV filters in coastal ecosystems. In general, EC50 results show that both EHMC and 4-MBC are the most toxic for our test species, followed by BP-3 and finally BP-4. The most affected species by the presence of these UV filters are the microalgae I. galbana, which showed toxicity thresholds in the range of μgL−1 units, followed by S. armata>P. Lividus>M. galloprovincialis. The UV filter concentrations measured in the sampled beach water were in the range of tens or even hundreds of ngL−1. The resulting risk quotients showed appreciable environmental risk in coastal environments for BP-3 and 4-MBC.
The analysis of sewage for urinary biomarkers of illicit drugs is a promising and complementary approach for estimating the use of these substances in the general population. For the first time, this ...approach was simultaneously applied in 19 European cities, making it possible to directly compare illicit drug loads in Europe over a 1-week period. An inter-laboratory comparison study was performed to evaluate the analytical performance of the participating laboratories. Raw 24-hour composite sewage samples were collected from 19 European cities during a single week in March 2011 and analyzed for the urinary biomarkers of cocaine, amphetamine, ecstasy, methamphetamine and cannabis using in-house optimized and validated analytical methods. The load of each substance used in each city was back-calculated from the measured concentrations. The data show distinct temporal and spatial patterns in drug use across Europe. Cocaine use was higher in Western and Central Europe and lower in Northern and Eastern Europe. The extrapolated total daily use of cocaine in Europe during the study period was equivalent to 356kg/day. High per capita ecstasy loads were observed in Dutch cities, as well as in Antwerp and London. In general, cocaine and ecstasy loads were significantly elevated during the weekend compared to weekdays. Per-capita loads of methamphetamine were highest in Helsinki and Turku, Oslo and Budweis, while the per capita loads of cannabis were similar throughout Europe. This study shows that a standardized analysis for illicit drug urinary biomarkers in sewage can be applied to estimate and compare the use of these substances at local and international scales. This approach has the potential to deliver important information on drug markets (supply indicator).
► First Europe-wide study of illicit drug use through sewage biomarker analysis. ► First application of a harmonized protocol to report and evaluate sampling, analysis and data handling. ► First inter-laboratory comparison of the analysis of illicit drugs. ► Comparable illicit drug use data for 19 European cities. ► Extrapolated total daily use of cocaine in Europe during the study period was equivalent to 356kg/day.
The majority of the techniques in the building comfort monitoring state-of-the-art are based on local/manual measurements or on permanent sensor networks. These techniques entail imprecision and ...randomness (in the first case) and high-cost installations and a lack of flexibility to eventual changes in buildings (in the second). However, intelligent mobile platforms are becoming significantly more important as they perform data acquisition adapted to specific scenarios and schedules. In this paper, we present a robotic platform focused on performing the workplace occupant comfort-monitoring process. The soundness of our proposal compared to others lies on that it gathers most of the necessary properties of an effective monitoring platform: it collects a wider range of variables; it autonomously navigates in inhabited buildings managing occlusions and unexpected events; it conducts multiple monitoring sessions in one or several days; it provides comfort evaluations. Additionally, it can be very useful for energy engineers and construction professional as it provides valuable information in regard to comfort: it detects the best/worst results of the tested variables, locates discomfort in specific areas and moments, recognizes discomfort patterns and globally classifies zones into comfort classes. This robotic platform has been successfully tested in the interiors of buildings, providing significant and clear results in comfort terms (a case study is presented in this paper). However, some limitations and improvements should be addressed. Among other aspects, the computer-robot communication robustness for long distances and the procedure for detecting of small obstacles must be improved in the future.
•ComfBot is an autonomous (not commanded) mobile platform, which carries out a complete (not partial) monitoring of the scene.•ComfBot collects temperature, humidity, pressure, lighting, CO2 levels, TVOC levels and noise levels.•The system can conduct several scheduled monitoring sessions during a day, which are previously programmed by the user.•It is a portable and low-cost platform, which enhances the applicability and affordability of the system.•It has powerful visualisation tools, which allows the user to carry out an efficient analysis of the data collected.•The system is able to detect areas that may not be comfortable in specific locations and at specific times.
This paper presents an integrated system that automatically provides detailed as-is semantic 3D models of buildings. The system is able to explore and reconstruct large scenes at a high level of ...detail, passing through five semantic levels, finally generating a detailed semantic model of the building. Our autonomous scanning platform collects raw data regarding the scene. At the first level of modelling, our autonomous scanning platform collects data regarding the scene and generates a point cloud that is later structured in a semantic point cloud model containing indoor, clutter and outlier point clouds. The second and third levels of semantic models consist of a simple B-rep representation and a model of basic building components, which includes the walls, ceiling, floor and columns, as well as their topology. Openings are then added, thus yielding our fourth semantic model. Finally, small components in buildings, such as sockets, switches, lights and others are recognised, resulting in the fifth semantic model. This approach has been tested on real data of building floors using our Mobile Platform for Autonomous Digitization (MoPAD). To the authors' knowledge this is the first work that, after obtaining 3D data with an autonomous mobile scanning platform, achieves such detailed modelling of building interiors. The performance of the method has been assessed quantitatively against ground truth on simulated and real environments. Two videos are available at the Supplementary material of this paper.
•Automatic generation of detailed semantic models of indoors of buildings with autonomous robots•The method obtains up to five models of buildings at different semantic levels.•The method recognises instances from a database of small building services components.•The performance of the system has been tested on indoor environments.•The accuracy of the models has been measured on real and simulated scenarios.
Arguably among the most globally impactful climate changes in Earth's past million years are the glacial terminations that punctuated the Pleistocene epoch. With the acquisition and analysis of ...marine and continental records, including ice cores, it is now clear that the Earth's climate was responding profoundly to changes in greenhouse gases that accompanied those glacial terminations. But the ultimate forcing responsible for the greenhouse gas variability remains elusive. The oceans must play a central role in any hypothesis that attempt to explain the systematic variations in pCO2 because the Ocean is a giant carbon capacitor, regulating carbon entering and leaving the atmosphere. For a long time, geological processes that regulate fluxes of carbon to and from the oceans were thought to operate too slowly to account for any of the systematic variations in atmospheric pCO2 that accompanied glacial cycles during the Pleistocene. Here we investigate the role that Earth's hydrothermal systems had in affecting the flux of carbon to the ocean and ultimately, the atmosphere during the last glacial termination. We document late glacial and deglacial intervals of anomalously old 14C reservoir ages, large benthic-planktic foraminifera 14C age differences, and increased deposition of hydrothermal metals in marine sediments from the eastern equatorial Pacific (EEP) that indicate a significant release of hydrothermal fluids entered the ocean at the last glacial termination. The large 14C anomaly was accompanied by a ∼4-fold increase in Zn/Ca in both benthic and planktic foraminifera that reflects an increase in dissolved Zn throughout the water column. Foraminiferal B/Ca and Li/Ca results from these sites document deglacial declines in CO 3 2 − throughout the water column; these were accompanied by carbonate dissolution at water depths that today lie well above the calcite lysocline. Taken together, these results are strong evidence for an increased flux of hydrothermally-derived carbon through the EEP upwelling system at the last glacial termination that would have exchanged with the atmosphere and affected both Δ14C and pCO2. These data do not quantify the amount of carbon released to the atmosphere through the EEP upwelling system but indicate that geologic forcing must be incorporated into models that attempt to simulate the cyclic nature of glacial/interglacial climate variability. Importantly, these results underscore the need to put better constraints on the flux of carbon from geologic reservoirs that affect the global carbon budget.
Practical methods for reconstructing past ocean carbonate chemistry are needed to study past periods of ocean acidification and improve understanding of the marine carbonate system's role in the ...global climate cycles. Planktic foraminiferal B/Ca may fill this role, but requires better understanding and improved proxy calibrations. We used Pacific Ocean core-top sediments to generate new calibrations of the B/Ca proxy for past carbonate system parameters in two upwelling/subpolar species of asymbiotic planktic foraminifera (Globigerina bulloides and Neogloboquadrina incompta). Both species show significant positive correlation of B/Ca with calcite saturation (Ωcalcite) and carbonate ion concentration (CO32−) across a broad range of environmental conditions. This suggests a calcification rate control on B/Ca incorporation (as Ωcalcite regulates calcification rate), in agreement with recent inorganic calcite studies. This is also consistent with a surface entrapment model of trace element incorporation into CaCO3. In neither species is B/Ca significantly correlated with pH, suggesting that pH does not directly regulate boron incorporation, and that calculation of pH directly from foraminiferal B/Ca is not suitable. Correlations between B/Ca and B(OH)4−, B(OH)4−/HCO3−, and B(OH)4−/DIC) are weaker than with Ωcalcite. Boron partition coefficients (KD=B/Casolid/B(OH)4−/HCO3−seawater) show little or no correlation with CO32− or temperature and vary widely, providing no support for application of KD to calculate carbonate system parameters from B/Ca. We also discuss potential effects of depth-related dissolution, temperature, and salinity on B/Ca. These empirical calibrations linking foraminiferal calcite B/Ca with Ωcalcite provide a strong tool for reconstructing the past ocean carbonate system and improve our understanding of the proxy's geochemical basis.
•Pacific coretop planktic foraminifera were used to calibrate the B/Ca proxy.•B/Ca in 2 species of planktic foraminifera is primarily controlled by (Ωcalcite).•This proxy calibration allows reconstruction ocean carbonate chemistry and climate.•B/Ca in both species shows no evidence of dissolution in low ΔCO32− bottom waters.
An innovative photoreactor, FluHelik, was used to promote the degradation of contaminants of emerging concern (CECs) by a photochemical UVC/H2O2 process. First, the system was optimized for the ...oxidation of a model antibiotic, oxytetracycline (OTC), using both ultrapure water (UPW) and a real urban wastewater (UWW) (collected after secondary treatment) as solution matrices. Following, the process was evaluated for the treatment of a UWW spiked with a mixture of OTC and 10 different pharmaceuticals established by the Swiss legislation at residual concentrations (∑CECs <660 μg L−1). The performance of the FluHelik reactor was analyzed both at lab and pre-pilot scale in multiple and single pass flow modes.
The efficiency of the FluHelik photoreactor, at lab-scale, was evaluated at different operational conditions (H2O2 concentration, UVC lamp power (4, 6 and 11 W) and flow rate) and further compared with a conventional Jets photoreactor. Both photoreactors exhibited similar OTC removal efficiencies at the best conditions; however, the FluHelik reactor showed to be more efficient (1.3 times) in terms of mineralization when compared with the Jets reactor. Additionally, the efficiency of the UVC/H2O2 photochemical system using the FluHelik photoreactor in reducing the toxicity of the real effluent containing 11 pharmaceuticals was evaluated through zebrafish (Danio rerio) embryo toxicity bioassays. FluHelik scale-up from laboratory to pre-pilot to promote UVC/H2O2 photochemical process proved to be feasible.
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•The FluHelik photoreactor proved to enhance the OTC oxidation by UVC/H2O2.•The FluHelik design showed superior performance than conventional Jets photoreactor.•FluHelik reactor + UVC/H2O2 effectively reduced CECs complying with Swiss legislation.•FluHelik reactor + UVC/H2O2 effectively reduced CECs toxicity to zebrafish embryos.•The FluHelik scale-up proved to be feasible employing several reactors in series.
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