Pure beryllium (Be) is a hard grey metal, the lightest of all metals, and can be found in mineral rocks, coal, soil, and volcanic dust and natural waters. It is lighter than aluminium yet three times as strong as steel. Beryllium compounds are commercially mined, and refined beryllium is used in a wide range of manufactured products and industries including ceramics, mirrors, special metal allo...

introduction atmosphere health is an important environmental issue and air pollution is not a local problem in a given area of the world. particles produced by either humans or the nature enter the atmosphere and return the earth’s surface at local, regional, or global scales after physico-chemical interactions. according to the reports by who, each year 2.4 million people lose their lives worl...

We investigate the possibility to search for metal-poor high column density (> ∼ 10 cm) clouds at high redshift (z) by using gamma ray burst (GRB) afterglows. Such clouds could be related to primeval galaxies which may cause a burst of star formation. We show that a large part of hydrogen is in molecular form in such a high column density environment. Therefore, hydrogen molecules (H2) rather t...

The thick disc contains stars formed within the first Gyr of Galactic history, and little is known about their planetary systems. The Spitzer MIPS instrument was used to search 11 of the closest of these old low-metal stars for circumstellar debris, as a signpost that bodies at least as large as planetesimals were formed. A total of 22 thick disc stars has now been observed, after including arc...

We explored if breeding parameters and egg shell quality of an insectivorous passerine, pied flycatcher Ficedula hypoleuca, have fully recovered after c.a. 99% decrease in dust emissions from a non-ferrous smelter in the course of the 23 year study period. Some potentially important population characteristics (density, phenology, age) and environmental variables (habitat, inter-specific competi...

Two polymeric resins, Polymal and Hetron, were evaluated to solidify/stabilize (S/S) for ultimate disposal brake lining dust containing asbestos. This dust was generated as part of a sequence of processing steps in the manufacture of automobile brake linings. The mean grain size of the lining dust for disposal was 298.2 m m, the range being from 24.9 to 567.3 m m. Based on the Toxicity Characte...

We present 1.25mm continuum data for a southern galaxy sample selected from the IRAS PSC and complete to S60 = 2 Jy. Two thirds of the galaxies have been detected and significant limits on the remaining objects have been set. We find, on a statistical basis, indications that the dust emission in these galaxies is somewhat more centrally concentrated than that of the optical light, possibly trac...

Daily average PM(10) (particulate matter which passes through a size selective impactor inlet with a 50% efficiency cut-off at 10 microm aerodynamic diameter), TSP (total suspended particulate matter) and their chemical species mass concentrations were measured at residential and industrial sites of an urban region of Kolkata during November 2003-November 2004. Source apportionment using chemic...

At redshift z ∼ > 5 Type II supernovae (SNII) are the only known dust sources with evolutionary timescales shorter than the Hubble time. We extend the model of dust formation in the ejecta of SNII by Todini & Ferrara (2001) to investigate the same process in pair-instability supernovae (SNγγ), which are though to arise from the explosion of the first, metal free, very massive (140-260 M⊙) stars...