Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Medicine and Health Sciences
Nutrition in Abrupt Sunlight Reduction Scenarios: analysis and prevention of malnutrition in low-income regions
Published: 2025-10-12
Subjects: Agriculture, Food Science, Life Sciences, Medicine and Health Sciences, Public Health
Purpose: An abrupt sunlight reduction scenario (ASRS) can be triggered by a nuclear war, a large volcanic eruption, or an asteroid strike, resulting in global agricultural collapse. A wide portfolio of resilient food interventions has been developed to address these issues, but even if they succeed in providing sufficient food energy for the global population, economic inequality could still [...]
Estimating Stability Constants and Entropy for Reactions Between Aqueous Metal Ions and Monovalent Oxygen-Bearing Ligands: Applications to Hydrothermal Metal–Organic Acid Systems
Published: 2025-10-01
Subjects: Life Sciences, Medicine and Health Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Linear free energy relations were obtained from existing experimental data and used to estimate stability constants for over 16,000 metal complexes with monovalent oxygen-bearing ligands comprising 75 metal species and 220 ligands. Similar relationships for metal-ligand entropy of association were also obtained which facilitate computation of stability constants from 0 to 125°C for over 6000 [...]
Trees and Life, Heat and Death: Integrating Temperature and Green Spaces with Social Determinants of Health in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.
Published: 2025-10-01
Subjects: Medicine and Health Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Objectives Climate change has wide-reaching implications for planetary and human health; one of its rising impacts is deaths related to extreme heat. This study attempts to integrate remotely sensed measures of temperature and greenness into the methodology of Code Red, a study examining the relationship between health and a variety of social determinants in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, initially [...]
Cadmium (Cd) Contamination in Soil, Leachate, and Air at Sukawinatan Landfill, Palembang, Indonesia: A Risk Assessment Perspective
Published: 2025-09-20
Subjects: Medicine and Health Sciences
The Sukawinatan Landfill in Palembang operates using an open dumping system, posing a potential risk of environmental contamination by the heavy metal cadmium (Cd). This study aims to analyze Cd contamination levels in soil, leachate, and air, and assess the potential health and environmental risks. Soil samples were randomly collected from three points at depths of 10 cm, 20 cm, and 30 cm. [...]
Post-Wildfire Indoor Pollution in WUI Areas Following the 2025 Los Angeles Fires — Part I: Establishing Baseline Contaminant Levels Prior to Home Reoccupation
Published: 2025-08-02
Subjects: Engineering, Medicine and Health Sciences
Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI) fires pose unique environmental pollution challenges due to the combustion of both natural vegetation and synthetic building materials. Following the 2025 Palisades and Eaton wildfires in Los Angeles, we conducted a field study to characterize indoor air quality and surface contamination in 19 homes before re-occupancy. Indoor PM₂.₅ and PM₁₀ concentrations averaged [...]
The rapid progress of climate change requires effective concepts for protecting people indoors
Published: 2025-06-30
Subjects: Life Sciences, Medicine and Health Sciences
According to the latest forecasts from the United Nations, it is highly likely that we will miss by a wide margin the 1.5 °C climate target set in the Paris Agreement in 2015. Rather, this planet has to prepare for a global temperature increase of 2.6 - 3.1 °C by 2100 and associated frequently occurring extreme weather events. It is therefore high time to design and technically equip the [...]
Determination of Low Molecular Weight Organic Acids in Environmental Samples by Ion Chromatography Method
Published: 2025-06-13
Subjects: Life Sciences, Medicine and Health Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Ion chromatography using the IonPac AS 11 HC analytical column, a 3.0 mM NaOH eluent, and a conductivity detector offers a straightforward, cost-effective, and rapid method for quantifying six organic acids, Lactate, Formate, Acetate, Propionate, Pyruvate, and Glyoxalate, at concentrations as low as micrograms per liter in environmental samples. The method includes comprehensive details on [...]
Evaluating the role of observational uncertainty in climate impact assessments: Temperature-driven yellow fever risk in South America
Published: 2025-04-18
Subjects: Medicine and Health Sciences
Global gridded temperature data sets (GGTDs) vary in their information sources, quality control procedures, generation techniques, and spatial-temporal resolutions, introducing observational uncertainty. This uncertainty is critical not only for studies on current climate conditions but also for future climate change projections, where observational data sets are used for bias correction and [...]
Inequities in Indoor Exposure to Wildfire-Related PM2.5 Across the Contiguous United States
Published: 2025-04-04
Subjects: Medicine and Health Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Exposure to wildfire smoke has been recognized as a major public health concern, but existing studies have focused on outdoor air, despite the fact that most people spend the majority of their time indoors, especially during wildfires. Here, we estimated indoor wildfire-related fine particulate matter (PM2.5) concentrations across 72,537 census tracts in the contiguous United States for the year [...]
Rethinking Environmental Sustainability in the Operating Room: Beyond the Reusability Assumption for Surgical Instruments
Published: 2025-02-21
Subjects: Environmental Public Health, Medicine and Health Sciences, Public Health
Addressing the climate crisis is an urgent global priority, yet the healthcare sector continues to face significant challenges in implementing long-term green solutions. The sector accounts for 4.4% of global carbon emissions, with an even greater impact of 7% in the Netherlands. The latest Dutch report- Barometer Groene OK- proposes ten key measures to reduce the healthcare carbon footprint, [...]
Majority of potable water microplastics are smaller than the 20 µm EU methodology limit for consumable water quality
Published: 2024-06-08
Subjects: Medicine and Health Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Microplastic (MP) content in nutrition including potable water is unregulated, although MP concentrations in bottled water can diverge by several orders of magnitude. The EU Directive 2020/2184 on consumable water quality recently proposed methodological approaches to the detection of MPs in potable water in the size range of 20-5000 µm. However, small MPs in the 1-20 µm range are far more likely [...]
Point of Care Devices Engaging Green Graphene: An Eco-conscious and Sustainable Paradigm
Published: 2024-04-06
Subjects: Engineering, Medicine and Health Sciences
The healthcare landscape has experienced a profound and irreversible transformation, primarily driven by the emergence of nanomaterial assisted point-of-care (POC) devices. Inclusion of nanomaterials in POC devices have revolutionized healthcare by enabling rapid, on-site diagnostics with minimal infrastructure requirements. Among the materials poised to lead this technological revolution, green [...]
Potentially toxic elements (PTEs) associated with asbestos chrysotile, tremolite and actinolite in the Calabria region (Italy)
Published: 2024-01-25
Subjects: Engineering, Medicine and Health Sciences
Potentially toxic elements (PTEs) host in asbestos elongate mineral particles is one of the factors which have been invoked to explain their toxicity/pathogenicity effects. This study quantifies and compares these elements in terms of major, minor and trace element concentrations (Si, Mg, Ca, Al, Fe, Mn, Cr, Co, Ni, Cu, Zn, Be, V, As, Rb, Sb, Ba, Pb, Sr) in various types of asbestos using micro [...]
Machine-Learning Approaches for Assessing Aerosol Optical Depth (AOD) in Ghana, West Africa
Published: 2024-01-08
Subjects: Education, Medicine and Health Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
In the field of environmental health, assessing air pollution exposure has historically posed challenges, primarily due to sparse ground observation networks. To overcome this limitation, satellite remote sensing of aerosols provides a valuable tool for monitoring air quality and estimating particulate matter concentration (PM) at the surface. In this study, we employ two predictive models to [...]
Crisis at the Salton Sea: The Vital Role of Science
Published: 2021-03-04
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Biogeochemistry, Chemistry, Climate, Earth Sciences, Environmental Chemistry, Environmental Public Health, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geochemistry, Geology, Geomorphology, Hydrology, Medicine and Health Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Public Health, Social and Behavioral Sciences
The Salton Sea—a hypersaline, terminal lake in southern California—is in crisis. A combination of mismanagement and competition among federal, state and local agencies has hindered efforts to address declining lake levels and unstable water chemistry. This delay has heightened the public health threat to regional communities as retreating shorelines expose dry lakebed— a source of potentially [...]