There is, I think, something ethereal about i —the square root of minus one. I remember first hearing about it at school. It seemed an odd beast at that time—an intruder hovering on the edge of reality.

Usually familiarity dulls this sense of the bizarre, but in the case of i it was the reverse: over the years the sense of its surreal nature intensified. It seemed that it was impossible to write mathematics that described the real world in …

I and i

Preface.- Contributors.- List of Abbreviations.- Section 1: Basic Principles: Introduction.-Sources of Heavy Metals and Metalloids in Soils.- Chemistry of Heavy Metals and Metalloids in Soils.- Methods for the Determination of Heavy Metals and Metalloids in Soils.- Effects of Heavy Metals and Metalloids on Soil Organisms.- Soil-Plant Relationships of Heavy Metals and Metalloids.- Heavy Metals and Metalloids as Micronutrients for Plants and Animals.-Critical Loads of Heavy Metals for Soils.- Section 2: Key Heavy Metals And Metalloids: Arsenic.- Cadmium.- Chromium and Nickel.- Cobalt and Manganese.- Copper.-Lead.- Mercury.- Selenium.- Zinc.- Section 3: Other Heavy Metals And Metalloids Of Potential Environmental Significance: Antimony.- Barium.- Gold.- Molybdenum.- Silver.- Thallium.- Tin.- Tungsten.- Uranium.- Vanadium.- Glossary of Specialized Terms.- Index.

Heavy metals in soils : trace metals and metalloids in soils and their bioavailability

Antimony in the environment: a review focused on natural waters: I. Occurrence

Organotin compounds are ubiquitous contaminants in the environment. The high biological activity of some compounds toward aquatic organisms lead to deleterious impacts in aquatic ecosystems. Here, the aquatic ecotoxicology of organotins is reviewed based on a multidisciplinary approach involving environmental chemical, toxicological, and ecological aspects. Basic results were obtained both with field and laboratory studies, and some of the most important recent results and conclusions are critically reviewed. The contamination of and fate in aquatic systems is reported and linked with effects at different levels of biological organization. Major emphasis is placed on the development of a concept of ecotoxicology that encompasses not only effect assessment alone, but also integrates environmental chemistry with aquatic toxicology. Thereby, the influence of speciation for bioavailability, basic modes of toxic action, and aquatic toxicity are discussed. This case study on organotins allows to a certain extent generalizations to ecotoxicology in general.

Ecotoxicology of organotin compounds.

Arsenic: occurrence, toxicity and speciation techniques

Introduction Fundamental principles of inductively coupled plasmas Instrumentation for ICP-AES Aerosol generation and sample transport in plasma spectrometry Fundamental aspects of ICP-MS Use of ICP-MS for isotope ratio measurements Alternative plasmas and sample introduction systems Environmental applications of plasma spectrometry Geological applications of plasma spectrometry Applications of plasma spectrometry in food science References Index .

Inductively coupled plasma spectrometry and its applications

The classification of tea according to region of origin using pattern recognition techniques and trace metal data

Microwave digestion procedures for environmental matrices

A preliminary study to classify tea by geographical origin using trace metal concentrations was made. Fifteen types of tea from ten different countries were digested using nitric acid. The digests were then analysed for their trace metal contents using either inductively coupled plasma-atomic emission spectrometry for the more concentrated analytes (Al, Ba, Ca, Cu, Fe, La, Mg, Mn, Sr, Ti and Zn) or inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry for the less concentrated analytes (Cd, Co, Cr, Cs, Hg, La, Li, Nd, Ni, Pb, Pr, Rb, Se, Sn, Ti, V and Zr). The data obtained from these results were then analysed using UNSCRAMBLE, a chemometrics package that incorporates principal component analysis, and by using Matlab 4.2cl High Performance Numeric Computation and Visualisation software. The results of the chemometrics analysis indicated that a distinction between African and Asian and between Chinese and other Asian teas could be made.

Preliminary study using trace element concentrations and a chemometrics approach to determine the geographical origin of tea

Revue detaillee de 100 references classees par methodes couplees (chromatographie en phase liquide couplee a spectrometrie d'absorption atomique de flamme, a atomisation electrothermique, spectrometrie de fluorescence atomique de flamme, spectrometrie d'emission optique) presentee sous forme de tableaux avec des details sur le detecteur, la methode, l'echantillon, des commentaires, l'element analysee

Steve J. Hill

Papers

Inductively coupled plasma spectrometry and its applications

The classification of tea according to region of origin using pattern recognition techniques and trace metal data

Microwave digestion procedures for environmental matrices

Preliminary study using trace element concentrations and a chemometrics approach to determine the geographical origin of tea

Directly coupled chromatography-atomic spectroscopy. Part 1. Directly coupled gas chromatography-atomic spectroscopy. A review