"Inscriptions of Poison" is an ethnographic, textual, and aesthetic engagement with possession, pollution, and the temporalities of poison in contemporary Italy’s postindustrial South. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in the city of Taranto (Puglia)—one of Europe’s most polluted cities—as well as archival work on Ernesto De Martino’s anthropology of possession rituals, this study of toxicity focuses on the southern Italian region of Puglia, which was the backdrop of two contrasting, yet interwoven histories of postwar modernization during the so-called “economic miracle” of the early 1960s. Puglia was the birthplace of the continent’s largest and most hazardous steel factory and simultaneously, the terrain of De Martino’s Gramscian anthropology of preindustrial folklore and agrarian rituals, yet the region’s role in industrial modernity and the study of ritual have rarely been examined in tandem. Re-reading the region’s intellectual and cultural past through a contemporary ethnography of industrial ruins, this dissertation interrogates the afterlives of possession in the ecological crisis of the present. For centuries, Italy’s South has been represented as “picturesque”—as the occluded of European modernity and the object of exoticization, folklorization, and racism. The environmental devastation and exposure these landscapes endure today cannot be thought outside their longstanding exploitation facilitated by this image as the nation’s “internal other.” Informed by these representations, contemporary environmental discourses amplify an image of a poisoned South, perceived as the source of pollution, rather than its victim. Intervening in the longue durée of this representational history, the dissertation explores a central fragment of Puglia’s cultural history of illness and healing: the possession ritual of tarantismo, traditionally performed by women to expel the poison of a tarantula. This ethnography of Taranto’s environmental catastrophe rethinks tarantismo in the present, as both a continued exposure to illness and the displacement of traditional methods for dealing with environmental risk. Drawing on De Martino’s work on the ritual, including his canonical work "The Land of Remorse" ("La terra del rimorso") (1961), as well as the archive of his fieldwork in Puglia, this study reads his corpus against the grain, finding it a philosophical account of “crisis of presence” that is mobilized as an analytic lens for the region’s current environmental catastrophe. This re-reading follows the trajectories of poison ethnographically, in its most varied material and affective forms: the venom of tarantulas, cloud-like dioxin emissions, contaminated milk, photographs of glittering iron ore dust, and the concealment of a wig. A central task of the work is thus to consider the intermedial relations between text, image, and theory, alongside toxic matter—to incorporate an intellectual history as the discursive part of a “material-discursive” analysis of ecological crisis. These interrelations are performatively engaged in the dissertation’s experimental use of text and image, while informing an understanding of toxicity as a material and metaphorical form inscribed (and remediated) through different media. By examining images and imaginaries of poison in Puglia, this ethnographic study of the aesthetics of toxicity demonstrates that the sensory field of environmental catastrophe affords a privileged terrain of political struggle. Intervening in current debates in ecocriticism and environmental humanities about the role of art and aesthetics in re-imagining human/nonhuman relations in an ecologically unstable world, "Inscriptions of Poison" analyzes the potency of industrial poison, while simultaneously revealing the bodily, psychological, religious, and aesthetic strategies deployed by the people of Taranto to understand, live with, and survive it.

This paper explores the visual content of the Russian Embassy in London in connection to the Skripal poisoning in Salisbury, UK on March 4, 2018. Considering the Skripal poisoning as a significant event in the relationship between the UK and Russia, that Russian disinformation increases substantially surrounding events perceived as key to security, and that the Russian Embassy in London is increasingly coming under investigation for controversial content, the aim of this paper is to deconstruct the tweets made by the Russian Embassy in London using the Skripal poisoning as a case study. This paper also situates this event within the broader context of Russian strategic narratives and disinformation. Tweets made by the Russian Embassy in London were collected between March 4th and Sept. 28th , 2018 and categorized visually into representations of actors, events, and message. Bleiker's (2015) visual content analysis framework was used, specifically through compositional, semiotic and discursive analyses. Through this deconstruction of visual conflict framing, it is hoped that a better understanding of the building blocks of Russian state disinformation can be ascertained within the UK domestic media environment.

During the last two years, the electricity prices in Sweden have risen due to unstable weather conditions, recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic and limited access to electricity. This has led to people finding alternative ways of heating up their residences, e.g., fireplace. The Swedish Medical Products Agency found an increase in carbon monoxide poisoning related to residential heating during 2022, which gave the topic a boost in the news and media. The aim for the study was to investigate the knowledge about carbon monoxide poisoning among Swedish house owners, and to see if there was a correlation between electricity prices and number of cases carbon monoxide poisoning in Sweden during the period 2008-2021. A paper- and web survey was conducted and sent out to 480 Swedish houseowners, selected by Postnord. Electricity prices and cases of carbon monoxide poisoning was received from the internet via Statistics Sweden and the Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare. Regarding the questions covered in this study, house owners' knowledge varied. Recognition of the symptoms and prevalence of carbon monoxide poisoning was known by most of the respondents, whilst course of action in case of intoxication was not as well known. A weak positive correlation was shown between electricity prices and number of cases carbon monoxide poisoning. The increase in electricity prices and the number of cases carbon monoxide poisoning during the 2020s, would make it interesting to do further investigation.

Micellar electrokinetic capillary chromatography (MECC) is a form of capillary zone electrophoresis. Addition of a surfactant produces micelles in an aqueous/organic buffer. Separation of drugs is obtained via differences in the electrophoretic mobilities of the analytes within the capillary, resulting from their electrophoretic velocity and the electroosmotic flow of the buffer in a given electric field. The migration order is determined by the differential partitioning of the drugs between the micelles and the aqueous/organic phase. Barbiturates were extracted from various biological fluids at pH 4.5 with TOXI-TUBES B. MECC analyses were performed using a Waters Quanta 4000 Capillary Electrophoretic System with a 745 Data Module with a 75 μ x 60 cm capillary and an aqueous/organic buffer of 85% 10 mM borate, 10 mM phosphate, 100 mM sodium dodecyl sulfate and 15% acetonitrile at a pH of 8.5 with a voltage of 20 kV using ultraviolet absorption detection at 214 nm. Migration times were: phenobarbital, 7.78 min.; butalbital, 8.01 min.; butabarbital, 8.23 min.; mephobarbital (internal standard), 8.88 min.; amobarbital, 9.41 min.; pentobarbital, 10.03 min. and secobarbital, 10.79 min. Correlation coefficients (r) between peak areas and concentration ranges of 3 to 60 μg/mL were from 0.964 to 0.999. Coefficients of variation (CV) raged from 2.6 to 8.6% between days and 2.3 to 9.8% within day. Application of this methodology to four forensic cases of butalbital intoxication detected concentrations of 0.7 to 12.7 μg/mL in blood; 0.8 to 1.9 μg/mL in vitreous humor and 1.5 to 7.6 μg/mL in urine. MECC is applicable to forensic analysis of barbiturates extracted from biological fluids.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)

Scania provides sustainable transport systems powered by bioethanol, biogas, biodiesel along with hybrid and conventional solutions. Today Scania offers the largest variety of engines operating on alternative fuels in the market. The number of the alternative fuel operated vehicles sold in 2016 increased by 40 % [1]. Nevertheless, one of the alternative fuels – biodiesel - is a source of inorganic contaminants. These impurities can detrimentally affect the diesel truck after-treatment system that is responsible for harmful emission abatement. As a consequence, better understanding of the alternative fuel impact on the after-treatment system is necessary for further development of a sustainable transportation system. This thesis is focused on the diesel oxidation catalyst (DOC) that is one of the major components in the diesel truck after-treatment system. Catalyst performance due to chemical deactivation of biodiesel derived inorganic contaminants (P, Na and Ca) is determined and analysed. The study covers PtPd/Al 2O3 DOC preparation and poisoning by the incipient wetness impregnation method, monolith dip-coating, fresh and poisoned catalyst characterization (BET, CO chemisorption, TPR, ICP-OES, TEM-EDS, SEM-EDS, XRD). Catalyst activity tests in a laboratory scale activity testing rig are performed to study carbon monoxide, nitric oxide and propylene oxidation reactions before and after the poisoning. Sulphur effect on the catalyst activity is determined after the gas-phase poisoning with SO2.

OBJECTIVES: Despite continued efforts to decrease environmental lead exposure, it remains a public health concern in the U.S. The aim of this study was to investigate the influence of lead exposure on dental caries risk among different populations. METHODS: We used data from Detroit Dental Health Project (DDHP), a cohort study of a representative sample of low-income African–American families in Detroit, Michigan, to investigate the influence of lead toxicity on dental caries risk among children, and to assess the effect of blood lead level on the caries experience among their caregivers. Data from Dental Longitudinal Study (DLS), a closed-panel prospective cohort study of oral health and aging, was used to assess the cross-sectional and longitudinal relationships between bone lead level as a cumulative measure of lead exposure and dental caries among older men. The outcome measure for cross-sectional analyses was dmfs/DMFS, which is the number of decayed surfaces, missing, and filled surfaces for each subject. Then adjusted new dmfs/DMFS increments were used for the longitudinal analyses. Descriptive and bivariate analyses were conducted on dental caries outcome by lead biomarkers. Multiple regression and GEE models were conducted controlling for confounding. RESULTS: History of lead toxicity (≥ 10µg/dl) and children’s caries risk was significantly associated in both cross-sectional analysis (PR = 1.50, p-value=0.003) and longitudinal analysis (IRR= 1.36, p-value=0.02). These associations were independent of confounding factors such as age, brushing frequency, soda consumption, income, and child and caregiver’s caries experience. On other hand, no significant associations were found between blood lead level and dental caries experience among African American adults (β=2.3, p-value=0.5), nor between high tibia/patella lead level and dental caries incident among older adult (β=0.1, p-value=0.7 for tibia, and β=0.3, p-value=0.1 for patella) . CONCLUSION: The results suggest that children with a history of lead toxicity are at a higher risk of developing dental caries compared to other children. However, there is no significant association between lead exposure and dental caries among adults. Therefore, children with a history of lead toxicity should be given special consideration in caries risk assessment and caries prevention programs. / 2019-09-26T00:00:00Z

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.