Building energy analysis tools are available in many forms that provide the ability to address a broad spectrum of energy-related issues in various combinations. Often these tools operate in isolation from one another, making it difficult to evaluate the interactions between related phenomena and interacting systems, forcing oversimplified assumptions to be made about various phenomena that cou...

—Environmental contaminants are a global problem, and their presence in the Arctic reflects the way in which the Arctic interacts with the rest of the world. Most contaminants are transported to the North on air and ocean currents from more southerly agricultural and industrial sources. Upon reaching the Arctic environment, many persistent contaminants bioaccumulate and biomagnify in the food w...

In this study, strain-resolved metagenomics was used to solve a mystery. A 6.4-Mbp complete closed genome was recovered from a soil metagenome and found to be astonishingly similar to that of Delftia acidovorans SPH-1, which was isolated in Germany a decade ago. It was suspected that this organism was not native to the soil sample because it lacked the diversity that is characteristic of other ...

Although there are a number of reports concerning the uptake of various radioactive nuclides from surrounding water by aquatic organisms1), the quantitative informations on the transfer of radioactive substances through aquatic food chains have been scarcely obtained until now. In near future, in accordance with the rapid developement of the peaceful utilization of atomic energy in Japan, the p...

Alternative fractional models of contaminant transport lead to a new travel time formula for arbitrary concentration levels. For an evolving contaminant plume in a highly heterogeneous aquifer, the new formula predicts much earlier arrival at low concentrations. Travel times of contaminant fronts and plumes are often obtained from Darcy's law calculations using estimates of average pore velocit...

INTRODUCTION Great interest is raising in food intolerances due to the lack, in many cases, of a particular sensitizing agent. OBJECTIVE We investigated the serum level of possible new haptens in 15 heavy meat consumers for sport fitness affected by various kinds of food intolerance and who had ever been administered antibiotics in their life for clinical problems. METHODS Forty ml of blood...

The seas are continuously pervaded by a broad range of contaminants entering the marine environment from polluted soils, the atmosphere, sewage, water transport or river streams (Shahidul Islam and Tanaka, 2004). Organic pollutants are of particular concern, because of their tendency to accumulate in specific organisms, thus threatening both ecosystem stability and human health (Fleming et al.,...

Deoxynivalenol (DON), one of the most abundant trichothecenes found on cereals, has been implicated in mycotoxicoses in both humans and farm animals. Low-dose toxicity is characterized by reduced weight gain, diminished nutritional efficiency, and immunologic effects. The levels and patterns of human food commodity contamination justify that DON consumption constitutes a public health issue. DO...

The intestinal epithelium is the first barrier against food contaminants. Zearalenone (ZEN) is an estrogenic mycotoxin that was identified as a common contaminant of cereal grains and food and feedstuffs. In the present study, we have investigated the in vitro effects of ZEN and some of its metabolites (α-ZOL, β-ZOL) in concentrations of 10-100 µM on a swine epithelial cell line: Intestinal por...

A rapid, simple and inexpensive method was developed for identifying the species of animal hair present as a contaminant in food. A polymerase chain reaction-amplified product length polymorphism (PCR-APLP) assay was applied to identify hair from human and others (cat, dog, rabbit, rat and mouse) or livestock (pig, cattle, horse, sheep, goat and chicken). The PCR primers were designed to amplif...