Ethylene Oxide in Southeastern Louisiana's Petrochemical Corridor: High Spatial Resolution Mobile Monitoring during HAP-MAP.

Ethylene oxide ("EtO") is an industrially made volatile organic compound and a known human carcinogen. There are few reliable reports of ambient EtO concentrations around production and end-use facilities, however, despite major exposure concerns. We present in situ, fast (1 Hz), sensitive EtO measurements made during February 2023 across the southeastern Louisiana industrial corridor. We aggregated mobile data at 500 m spatial resolution and reported average mixing ratios for 75 km of the corridor. Mean and median aggregated values were 31.4 and 23.3 ppt, respectively, and a majority (75%) of 500 m grid cells were above 10.9 ppt, the lifetime exposure concentration corresponding to 100-in-one million excess cancer risk (1 × 10-4). A small subset (3.3%) were above 109 ppt (1000-in-one million cancer risk, 1 × 10-3); these tended to be near EtO-emitting facilities, though we observed plumes over 10 km from the nearest facilities. Many plumes were highly correlated with other measured gases, indicating potential emission sources, and a subset was measured simultaneously with a second commercial analyzer, showing good agreement. We estimated EtO for 13 census tracts, all of which were higher than EPA estimates (median difference of 21.3 ppt). Our findings provide important information about EtO concentrations and potential exposure risks in a key industrial region and advance the application of EtO analytical methods for ambient sampling and mobile monitoring for air toxics.

Combating hate speech using an adaptive ensemble learning model with a case study on COVID-19.

Social media platforms generate an enormous amount of data every day. Millions of users engage themselves with the posts circulated on these platforms. Despite the social regulations and protocols imposed by these platforms, it is difficult to restrict some objectionable posts carrying hateful content. Automatic hate speech detection on social media platforms is an essential task that has not been solved efficiently despite multiple attempts by various researchers. It is a challenging task that involves identifying hateful content from social media posts. These posts may reveal hate outrageously, or they may be subjective to the user or a community. Relying on manual inspection delays the process, and the hateful content may remain available online for a long time. The current state-of-the-art methods for tackling hate speech perform well when tested on the same dataset but fail miserably on cross-datasets. Therefore, we propose an ensemble learning-based adaptive model for automatic hate speech detection, improving the cross-dataset generalization. The proposed expert model for hate speech detection works towards overcoming the strong user-bias present in the available annotated datasets. We conduct our experiments under various experimental setups and demonstrate the proposed model's efficacy on the latest issues such as COVID-19 and US presidential elections. In particular, the loss in performance observed under cross-dataset evaluation is the least among all the models. Also, while restricting the maximum number of tweets per user, we incur no drop in performance.

Carbon Kagome nanotubes-quasi-one-dimensional nanostructures with flat bands.

In recent years, a number of bulk materials and heterostructures have been explored due their connections with exotic materials phenomena emanating from flat band physics and strong electronic correlation. The possibility of realizing such fascinating material properties in simple realistic nanostructures is particularly exciting, especially as the investigation of exotic states of electronic matter in wire-like geometries is relatively unexplored in the literature. Motivated by these considerations, we introduce in this work carbon Kagome nanotubes (CKNTs)-a new allotrope of carbon formed by rolling up Kagome graphene, and investigate this material using specialized first principles calculations. We identify two principal varieties of CKNTs-armchair and zigzag, and find both varieties to be stable at room temperature, based on ab initio molecular dynamics simulations. CKNTs are metallic and feature dispersionless states (i.e., flat bands) near the Fermi level throughout their Brillouin zone, along with an associated singular peak in the electronic density of states. We calculate the mechanical and electronic response of CKNTs to torsional and axial strains, and show that CKNTs appear to be more mechanically compliant than conventional carbon nanotubes (CNTs). Additionally, we find that the electronic properties of CKNTs undergo significant electronic transitions-with emergent partial flat bands and tilted Dirac points-when twisted. We develop a relatively simple tight-binding model that can explain many of these electronic features. We also discuss possible routes for the synthesis of CKNTs. Overall, CKNTs appear to be unique and striking examples of realistic elemental quasi-one-dimensional materials that may display fascinating material properties due to strong electronic correlation. Distorted CKNTs may provide an interesting nanomaterial platform where flat band physics and chirality induced anomalous transport effects may be studied together.

The Biological Qubit: Calcium Phosphate Dimers, Not Trimers.

The Posner molecule (calcium phosphate trimer, Ca9(PO4)6) has been hypothesized to function as a biological quantum information processor due to its supposedly long-lived entangled 31P nuclear spin states. This hypothesis was challenged by our recent finding that the molecule lacks a well-defined rotational axis of symmetry─an essential assumption in the proposal for Posner-mediated neural processing─and exists as an asymmetric dynamical ensemble. Following up, we investigate here the spin dynamics of the molecule's entangled 31P nuclear spins within the asymmetric ensemble. Our simulations show that entanglement between two nuclear spins prepared in a Bell state in separate Posner molecules decays on a subsecond time scale─much faster than previously hypothesized, and not long enough for supercellular neuronal processing. Calcium phosphate dimers (Ca6(PO4)4) however, are found to be surprisingly resilient to decoherence and are able to preserve entangled nuclear spins for hundreds of seconds, suggesting that neural processing might occur through them instead.

Cumulative effect of PM2.5 components is larger than the effect of PM2.5 mass on child health in India.

While studies on ambient fine particulate matter (PM2.5) exposure effect on child health are available, the differential effects, if any, of exposure to PM2.5 species are unexplored in lower and middle-income countries. Using multiple logistic regression, we showed that for every 10 µg m-3 increase in PM2.5 exposure, anaemia, acute respiratory infection, and low birth weight prevalence increase by 10% (95% uncertainty interval, UI: 9-11), 11% (8-13), and 5% (4-6), respectively, among children in India. NO3-, elemental carbon, and NH4+ were more associated with the three health outcomes than other PM2.5 species. We found that the total PM2.5 mass as a surrogate marker for air pollution exposure could substantially underestimate the true composite impact of different components of PM2.5. Our findings provide key indigenous evidence to prioritize control strategies for reducing exposure to more toxic species for greater child health benefits in India.

A Chirality-Based Quantum Leap.

There is increasing interest in the study of chiral degrees of freedom occurring in matter and in electromagnetic fields. Opportunities in quantum sciences will likely exploit two main areas that are the focus of this Review: (1) recent observations of the chiral-induced spin selectivity (CISS) effect in chiral molecules and engineered nanomaterials and (2) rapidly evolving nanophotonic strategies designed to amplify chiral light-matter interactions. On the one hand, the CISS effect underpins the observation that charge transport through nanoscopic chiral structures favors a particular electronic spin orientation, resulting in large room-temperature spin polarizations. Observations of the CISS effect suggest opportunities for spin control and for the design and fabrication of room-temperature quantum devices from the bottom up, with atomic-scale precision and molecular modularity. On the other hand, chiral-optical effects that depend on both spin- and orbital-angular momentum of photons could offer key advantages in all-optical and quantum information technologies. In particular, amplification of these chiral light-matter interactions using rationally designed plasmonic and dielectric nanomaterials provide approaches to manipulate light intensity, polarization, and phase in confined nanoscale geometries. Any technology that relies on optimal charge transport, or optical control and readout, including quantum devices for logic, sensing, and storage, may benefit from chiral quantum properties. These properties can be theoretically and experimentally investigated from a quantum information perspective, which has not yet been fully developed. There are uncharted implications for the quantum sciences once chiral couplings can be engineered to control the storage, transduction, and manipulation of quantum information. This forward-looking Review provides a survey of the experimental and theoretical fundamentals of chiral-influenced quantum effects and presents a vision for their possible future roles in enabling room-temperature quantum technologies.

The Dynamical Ensemble of the Posner Molecule Is Not Symmetric.

The Posner molecule, Ca9(PO4)6, has long been recognized to have biochemical relevance in various physiological processes. It has found recent attention for its possible role as a biological quantum information processor, whereby the molecule purportedly maintains long-lived nuclear spin coherences among its 31P nuclei (presumed to be symmetrically arranged), allowing it to function as a room temperature qubit. The structure of the molecule has been of much dispute in the literature, although the S6 point group symmetry has often been assumed and exploited in calculations. Using a variety of simulation techniques (including ab initio molecular dynamics and structural relaxation), rigorous data analysis tools, and by exploring thousands of individual configurations, we establish that the molecule predominantly assumes low-symmetry structures (Cs and Ci) at room temperature, as opposed to the higher-symmetry configurations explored previously. Our findings have important implications for the viability of this molecule as a qubit.

Air quality forecasting using artificial neural networks with real time dynamic error correction in highly polluted regions.

Air pollution is an important issue, especially in megacities across the world. There are emission sources within and also in the regions around these cities, which cause fluctuations in air quality based on prevailing meteorological conditions. Short term air quality forecasting is used not to just possibly mitigate forthcoming high air pollution episodes, but also to plan for reduced exposures of residents. In this study, a model using Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) has been developed to forecast pollutant concentration of PM10, PM2.5, NO2, and O3 for the current day and subsequent 4 days in a highly polluted region (32 different locations in Delhi). The model has been trained using meteorological parameters and hourly pollution concentration data for the year 2018 and then used for generating air quality forecasts in real-time. It has also been equipped with Real Time Correction (RTC), to improve the quality of the forecasts by dynamically adjusting the forecasts based on the model performance during the past few days. The model without RTC performs decently, but with RTC the errors are further reduced in forecasted values. The utility of the model has been demonstrated in real-time and model validations were performed for the whole year of 2018 and also independently for 2019. The model shows very good performance for all the pollutants on several evaluation metrics. Coefficient of correlations for various pollutants varies from 0.79-0.88 to 0.49-0.68 between the Day0 to Day4 forecasts. Lowest deterioration of performance was observed for ozone over the four days of forecasts. Use of RTC further improves the model performance for all pollutants.