The weight of pollution: exposure linked to obesity

Chronic exposure to environmental pollutants found to increase risk of cardiovascular disease

08-Nov-2023 - In an era where exposure to commonly used pollutants present in our environment, in our homes and in our food, is virtually inevitable, ground-breaking research conducted by Professor Brice Appenzeller of the Luxembourg Institute of Health has unveiled a profoundly surprising health outcome of ...

New insight into how long-banned chemicals unleash their toxicity inside the body

28-Nov-2022 - Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) were widely used in industrial and commercial products including plastics, paints, electronic equipment and insulating fluids. Their manufacture was extensively banned from the late 70s onwards due to their toxicity, however large amounts still remain in our ...

Nanocrystals Store Light Energy and Drive Chemical Reactions

Low toxicity, high efficiency: ZnSe/ZnS quantum dots as photocatalysts

15-Nov-2022 - Chemistry is increasingly making use of the trick plants can do with photosynthesis: driving chemical reactions that run poorly or do not occur spontaneously at all with light energy. This requires suitable photocatalysts that capture light energy and make it available for the reaction. In the ...

The Secret Contamination of Polar Bears

Hundreds of unrecognized halogenated contaminants discovered in polar bear serum

05-Dec-2018 - Using a new approach to measure chemical contaminants in polar bears, scientists from Canada and the United States found a large variety of new chlorinated and fluorinated substances, including many new polychlorinated biphenyl metabolites. Worryingly, these previously unrecognized contaminants ...

The cycling of poisonous chemicals from the past

Monsoon remobilizes phased-out chemicals stored in South Asian soils

15-Aug-2018 - Persistent organic pollutants are toxic chemicals that cannot decompose in nature, or only do so very slowly, and are harmful to the environment. Through accumulation along food chains they also have significant negative effects on human health. Nowadays, many of them are banned. Traces of those ...

Molecules change shape when wet

21-Nov-2016 - Broadband rotational spectroscopy unravels structural reshaping of isolated molecules in the gas phase to accommodate water Researchers around Melanie Schnell from the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter at CFEL and from the Hamburg Centre for Ultrafast Imaging (CUI) ...

Melting ice sheet could release frozen Cold War-era waste

08-Aug-2016 - In the 1960s, a military camp situated beneath the ice in Greenland was abandoned. Now, an international study in collaboration with the University of Zurich has revealed: Climate change could remobilize the abandoned hazardous waste believed to be buried forever beneath the Greenland Ice Sheet. ...

Chemophobia shouldn't be on the menu

New Dartmouth study finds many people unnecessarily fear low amounts of chemicals in their food

19-Aug-2013 - When it comes to what's for dinner – or breakfast and lunch for that matter-- many people suffer from chemophobia, an irrational fear of natural and synthetic chemicals that pose no risk to our health, a Dartmouth study finds. Chemistry Professor Gordon Gribble, whose paper appears in the journal ...

MAK value lowered for chlorinated biphenyls

07-Aug-2012 - Chlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) are a group of substances for which the 2012 List of MAK and BAT Values submitted by the Senate Commission for the Investigation of Health Hazards of Chemical Compounds in the Work Area of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) specifies ...

Environmental contaminants in foodstuffs

BfR research project on the intake of heavy metals and dioxins completed

14-Jan-2011 - The final report of the research project "Foodborne exposure to environmental contaminants" (LExUKon) is now available. In this project scientists of the Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR) have calculated, together with colleagues from the Research and Advisory Institute for Hazardous ...