Recently, a novel ninhydrin reaction with cyanide has opened new ways to detect this poison in the body fluids and the environmental samples. Mainly, detection of cyanide with ninhydrin at a crime scene could be of prime interest for forensic investigators. Besides, the reaction conditions are very common, except the need to avoid oxygen and oxidizers. The ninhydrin-based assay proved to be hig...

Fire is a rare but potentially disastrous operating room misadventure. In this article, the authors describe the elements of operating room fires and present an illustrative case. The risk of fire can be minimized when the operating room team understands the interactions among the three sides of the classic fire triangle: oxidizers, fuels, and ignition sources. Lists of fire prevention techniqu...

Except for several conspicuous cases, very little is known about sulfur oxidizers living in natural freshwater environments. Sulfuricella denitrificans skB26 is a psychrotolerant sulfur oxidizer recently isolated from a freshwater lake as a representative of a new genus in the class Betaproteobacteria. In this study, an approximately 3.2-Mb draft genome sequence of strain skB26 was obtained. In...

Issue: Drying lumber in the Western U.S. consumes over 60 million GJ of fuel. Over half of this is natural gas and the balance is from wood. Large quantities are also dried in the southern U.S. Dramatically reducing energy use would require major changes in the drying process; however, small changes in the way a mill is operated can have a significant impact on the energy use. Environmental com...

There are many potential sources of ignition which can trigger a fire or explosion: electrical sparks, friction, static discharge, hot surfaces, air streams, and direct-fired burners in ovens and thermal oxidizers. Since we can never be guaranteed that an environment will remain completely free of air or of a source of ignition, the most reliable means of preventing fire or explosion is to meas...

The surface waters at the ultramafic ophiolitic outcrop in Chimaera, Turkey, are characterized by high pH values and high metal levels due to the percolation of fluids through areas of active serpentinization. We describe the influence of the liquid chemistry, mineralogy, and H2 and CH4 levels on the bacterial community structure in a semidry, exposed, ultramafic environment. The bacterial and ...

An abundance of hydrocarbon oxidizing microbes is found, not unexpectedly, in areas where extraordinary quantities of hydrocarbons exist in the biosphere. In particular, bacteria of the genus Mycobacterium develop in areas of oil and gas production and in areas of petroliferous gas seeps. One of these species, Mycobacterium paraffinicum n. sp., shows a high degree of specificity for petroleum h...

Despite most lakes in the Arctic being perennially or seasonally frozen for at least 40% of the year, little is known about microbial communities and nutrient cycling under ice cover. We assessed the vertical microbial community distribution and geochemical composition in early spring under ice in a seasonally ice-covered lake in southwest Greenland using amplicon-based sequencing that targeted...