The California OSHA Airborne Contaminant Advisory Committee reviewed several hundred substances and recommended occupational exposure limits with the intent of worker and employer protection. The model used offers important benefits. First, by allowing open meetings, the process was transparent, and input could be offered by concerned stakeholders. Second, the process was data-driven and, there...

Study on the accumulation level of heavy metals was conducted on sediment and fishes from estuaries of Bay of Bengal. Heavy metals were determined by using Inductively Coupled Plasma Optical Emission Spectrometer (ICP-OES) and the results were compared to permissible limits of WHO/USEPA. The accumulation patterns of Fe and Cd were found predominantly in all samples tested when correlated with o...

We consider a simple language for writing causal action theories, and postulate several properties for the state transition models of these theories. We then consider some possible embeddings of these causal action theories in some other action formalisms, and their implementations in logic programs with answer set semantics. In particular, we propose to consider what we call permissible transl...

The design of a robust superhydrophobic surface is a widely pursued topic. While many investigations are limited to applications with high impact velocities (for raindrops of the order of a few meters per second), the essence of robustness is yet to be analyzed for applications involving quasi-static liquid transfer. To achieve robustness with high impact velocities, the surface parameters (geo...

As a molecular imaging technique, bioluminescence tomography (BLT) with its highly sensitive detection and facile operation can significantly reveal molecular and cellular information in vivo at the whole-body small animal level. However, because of complex photon transportation in biological tissue and boundary detection data with high noise, bioluminescent sources in deeper positions generall...

BACKGROUND The concentration of heavy metals in drinking water is very important. OBJECTIVE To to evaluate the chemistry of some heavy metals in surface drinking water of Dakahlia Governorate, Egypt. METHODS 51 surface drinking water samples were collected from the main surface water stations and compact units in October 2009 and analyzed chemically. 26 water samples were analyzed by atomic...

A total-weighting of a graph G = (V,E) is a mapping f which assigns to each element y ∈ V ∪ E a real number f(y) as the weight of y. A total-weighting f of G is proper if the colouring φf of the vertices of G defined as φf (v) = f(v) + ∑ e∋v f(e) is a proper colouring of G, i.e., φf (v) ̸= φf (u) for any edge uv. For positive integers k and k′, a graph G is called (k, k′)-total-weight-choosable ...

The increasing prevalence of environmental pollution, especially soil contamination with heavy metals has led to their uptake in the human food chains through plant parts. Accumulation and magnification of heavy metals in human tissues through consumption of herbal remedies can cause hazardous impacts on health. Therefore, chemical profiling of nine heavy metals (Mn, Cr, Pb, Fe, Cd, Co, Zn, Ni ...

Background Access to clean and safe drinking water is still a problem in developing countries and more pronounced in rural areas. Due to erratic supply of potable, rural dwellers often seek for an alternative source of water to meet their basic water needs. The objective of this study is to monitor the microbiological and physicochemical water quality parameters of Nzhelele River which is a maj...

Gender, age, and culturally specific beliefs are often considered relevant to observed variation in social interactions. At present, however, the scientific literature is mixed with respect to the significance of these factors in guiding moral judgments. In this study, we explore the role of each of these factors in moral judgment by presenting the results of a web-based study of Eastern (i.e.,...