Office of Research and Development Publications

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The aggregation and long-term (25 d) sedimentation behaviors of reduced graphene oxide (RGO) and its three successively self-assembled nanohybrids with magnetite (Fe3O4) and zerovalent silver (Ag0) nanoparticles were investigated. The aggregation behaviors of the nanomaterials in...

Many cities are experiencing long-term declines in population and economic activity. As a result, frameworks for urban sustainability need to address the unique challenges and opportunities of such shrinking cities. Shrinking, particularly in the U.S., has led to extensive vacant...

There currently are a wide variety of approaches emerging to adjust air sensor data, either on the device or more commonly, on a manufacturer's server or cloud. The goal of these adjustments are to correct for measurement artifacts and produce more accurate values. However, most ...

It is often of interest to model the incidence and duration of threshold exceedance events for an environmental variable over a set of monitoring locations. Such data arrive over continuous time and can be considered as observations of a two-state process yielding, sequentially, ...

Urban water systems consist of natural and engineered flows of water interacting in complex ways. System complexity can be understood via mass conservative models that account for the interrelationships among all major flows and storages. We have developed a generic urban water s...

The Maximum Cumulative Ratio (MCR) quantifies the degree to which a single chemical drives the cumulative risk of an individual exposed to multiple chemicals. Phthalates are a class of chemicals with ubiquitous exposures in the general population that have the potential to cause ...

Predictive testing to characterise substances for their skin sensitisation potential has historically been based on animal models such as the Local Lymph Node Assay (LLNA) and the Guinea Pig Maximisation Test (GPMT). In recent years, EU regulations, have provided a strong incenti...

Select volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in ambient air were measured at four fenceline sites at a petroleum refinery in Whiting, Indiana, USA using modified EPA Method 325 A/B with passive tubes and EPA Compendium Method TO-15 with canister samplers. One-week, time-integrated s...

Arsenic (As) is one of the most widespread, toxic elements in the environment, and human activities have resulted in a large number of contaminated areas. However abundant, the potential of As toxicity from exposure to contaminated soils is limited to the fraction that will disso...

Under the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Arsenic Demonstration Program, an iron removal (IR) process consisting of permanganate oxidation followed by GreensandPlus™ filtration was shown to be effective in removing soluble As(III) (24.1 μg/L on average) from Waynesville, IL ...

Coral reef condition on the south shore of St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands, was assessed at various distances from Charlotte Amalie, the most densely populated city on the island. Human influence in the area includes industrial activity, wastewater discharge, cruise ship docks, a...

The epidemic of Zika in the Western hemisphere has led to intense investigations of all species important in the transmission of Zika virus (ZikV), including putative mosquito vectors. Although evidence points to Stegomyia (= Aedes) (Diptera: Culicidae) mosquitoes as the primary ...

The exposure of readily soluble components of overburden materials from surface coal mining to air and water results in mineral oxidation and carbonate mineral dissolution, thus increasing coal mine water conductivity. A conductivity benchmark of 300 µS/cm for mine water dischar...

The impact of air pollution on human health and the associated external costs in Europe and the United States (US) for the year 2010 are modeled by a multi-model ensemble of regional models in the frame of the third phase of the Air Quality Modelling Evaluation International Init...

Recreational ecosystem services (RES), understood as the numerous benefits people obtain from landscapes and the natural environment, are a topical area of policy, research and society. This Editorial introduces the current state of RES research, provides an overview of the 21 co...

Purpose of Review:&nbsp;&nbsp;Urea has been utilized as a reductant in diesel fuels to lower emission of nitrogen oxides, igniting interest in probable human health hazards associated with exposure to exogenous urea. Here, we summarize and update key findings on potential health ...

Objective: Exposure to mobile source emissions is nearly ubiquitous in developed nations, and is associated with multiple adverse health outcomes. There is an ongoing need to understand the specificity of traffic exposure associations with vascular outcomes, particularly in indi...

Background Swimming in fecally-contaminated waterbodies can result in gastrointestinal infections. However, the pathogenic microorganisms responsible are not well understood because sporadic cases of illness are not reported completely, exposure information is often not collecte...

Based on long-term monitoring conducted in Chang-ning county, a pilot site of the &lsquo;Grain for Green Program&rsquo; (GFGP), an integrated emergy and economic method was applied to evaluate the dynamic ecological-economic performance of 3 kinds of bamboo systems planted on slo...

As part of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s continuing assessment of advanced light-duty automotive technologies to support the setting of appropriate national greenhouse gas standards, and to evaluate the impact of new technologies on in-use emissions, a 2016 Honda Civ...

In the field of environmental economics, the use of benefit estimates reported in existing nonmarket valuation studies to calculate willingness to pay for new policy cases has come to be known as “benefit transfer.” To make quantitative statements about the likely effects of pub...

Gene drives are a topic of growing interest since the CRISPR/Cas9 system was discovered. In 2016, the National Academies published a report about science, governance, and engagement related to gene drive research and testing. There are valuable insights in all chapters, but espec...

This report outlines an approach to construct a developmental toxicity ontology. Such an ontology will facilitate computer-based prediction of substances likely to induce human developmental toxicity.

Projected increases in ocean pCO2 levels are anticipated to affect calcifying organisms more rapidly and to a greater extent than other marine organisms. The effects of ocean acidification (OA) have been documented in numerous species of corals in laboratory studies, largely test...

Many watershed models simulate overland and instream microbial fate and transport, but few provide loading rates on land surfaces and point sources to the waterbody network. This paper describes the underlying equations for microbial loading rates associated with 1) land-applied ...