The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) investigators compared methods for collecting personal breathing zone (PBZ) air samples for particulates during abrasive blasting at a shipyard. Abrasive blasting is the cleaning or finishing of surfaces by the use of an abrasive carried in a strong current of air. The U.S. government has provided regulatory requirements and guid...

Passive sampling devices were used to measure air vapor and water dissolved phase concentrations of 33 polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and 22 oxygenated PAHs (OPAHs) at four Gulf of Mexico coastal sites prior to, during, and after shoreline oiling from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill (DWH). Measurements were taken at each site over a 13 month period, and flux across the water-air bounda...

Air quality is a serious and worsening problem in the rapidly growing cities of sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). However, the lack of ambient monitoring data, and particularly urban roadside concentrations for particulate matter in SSA cities severely hinders our ability to describe temporal and spatial patterns of concentrations, characterize exposure–response relationships for key health outcomes, e...

As the harmful effects of low-level exposure to hazardous organic air pollutants become more evident, there is constant pressure to improve the detection limits of indoor and ambient air monitoring methods, for example, by collecting larger air volumes and by optimising the sensitivity of the analytical detector. However, at the other end of the scale, rapid industrialisation in the developing ...

Small robotic systems such as Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs) need to react quickly to their dynamic environments, while having only a limited amount of energy and processing onboard. In this article, subsampling of local image samples is investigated as a straightforward and broadly applicable approach to improve the computational efficiency of vision algorithms. In sub-sampling only a small subset ...