Lisa Kadonaga

Direct Environmental Lead Detection by Photoluminescent Perovskite Formation with Nanogram Sensitivity Although the global ban on leaded gasoline has markedly reduced lead poisoning, many other environmental sources of lead exposure, such as paint, pipes, mines, and recycling sites remain. Existing methods to identify these sources are either costly or unreliable. We report here a new, sensitive, and inexpensive lead detection method that relies on the formation of a perovskite semiconductor. The method only requires spraying the material of interest with methylammonium bromide and observing whether photoluminesence occurs under UV light to indicate the presence of lead. The method detects as little as 1.0 ng/mm2 of lead by the naked eye and 50 pg/mm2 using a digital photo camera. We exposed more than 50 different materials to our reagent and found no false negatives or false positives. The method readily detects lead in soil, paint, glazing, cables, glass, plastics, and dust and could be widely used for testing the environment and preventing lead poisoning.

@funranium.bsky.social other than needing proper eye protection from the 365nm UV light, this is such a neat lead detection method

pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/...

I should add -- this was back in 2020, just as the pandemic was spreading. My campus was hosting the national geography conference and I was lobbying the organizers to include bios of Ghanimat and other geographers killed in the crash -- but the conference was cancelled so no program was printed.

I'm still kind of shocked at how a perfect metaphor just fell into our laps. Trump insisting that he can guess people's shoe sizes, he gets them the wrong size, and they're too scared to tell him he's wrong so they're limping/stumbling around in those shoes ...

This woman, Ghanimat Azhdari, had just started her PhD at my former department in Ontario. She and 175 other people were killed when their plane was shot down by the IRGC. Her family's still grieving her loss, and now more of them could die in this stupid war.

It's nice to have some good environmental news.

🧪🏺 Update - authors have new paper showing how useless gen- #AI is for archaeological illustration.
All 400 images were multiply inaccurate (physically, socially, technologically, environmentally), even with improved prompts.

JUST USE HUMAN EXPERTS & ARTISTS

www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

There used to be a population of rattlesnakes living in my hometown, but they were forced into extinction by the type of roundup described in this article.
Niagara peninsula residents will have to sit with the possibility that under SARA they could be re-introduced.
www.canada.ca/en/environme...

© CBC/Radio-Canada 2026. All rights reserved.

Link:
www.cbc.ca/listen/live-...

Capsule summary for CBC Radio Ideas episode, Mar 9 2026 "What if your favourite food became extinct?" "Flavours have been lost to the past, says culinary physicist Lenore Newman. She points to the extinction of the very popular passenger pigeon as an example. It became extinct due to the industrialized farming of chicken. We're now transitioning to lab-raised food -- a technology capable of pushing a global history of scarcity into one of abundance." https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-23-ideas/clip/16202089-what-favourite-food-became-extinct

Cool episode of Ideas on CBC Radio tonight.
Ecological and food history -- using the loss of the passenger pigeon as a jumping-off point.

Discussion in the chat, after Toni Schneider (new Bluesky chief) posted an introduction to members. ‪Dave Karpf‬ (@davekarpf.bsky.social‬): Please just promise us you won’t verify Jerry. ‪Jerry Chen‬ (@jcsalterego.bsky.social‬): dammit man wyd ‪Bill Horton‬ (@mrhortywho.bsky.social‬): He meant Seinfeld

Let the games begin! Right after the platform's new chief posted.

3/10/2026- The Board of Peace www.timesfreepress.com/news/2026/ma...

Arguably this is a side-show compared with the horrors unfolding across the Mideast, but -- pretty revealing.

Alexander Butterfield, Nixon aide who disclosed Watergate tapes, dies at 99 The White House aide who inadvertently hastened Richard Nixon’s resignation over the Watergate scandal when he revealed that the president had bugged the Oval Office and Cabinet Room and routinely rec...

Alexander Butterfield "had the heavy responsibility of revealing something he was sworn to secrecy on, which is the installation of the Nixon taping system," John Dean told the AP. "He stood up and told the truth." https://to.pbs.org/40hUFsz

I didn't know this about NYC and the swans. I guess that's why EB White had his hero Louis go to Boston instead?

Writing the abstract is not an afterthought; the abstract is not some minor convenience for readers. It is the heart of your idea, the point of the entire process. Writing it is a form of discipline, a way of testing your own knowledge and emerging with something simple, memorable, and correct.

3/4

The abstract is the ABSOLUTE LAST thing you should delegate to anyone or anything else. Not an RA, not an AI, not your colleague down the hall, no one.

If you—YOU PERSONALLY—can't explain your article well enough to write a good abstract, you don't understand it well enough to publish it.

2/4

Imagine how the survivors (rescued by the Sri Lankan navy because the Americans didn't bother) would feel, hearing this. And the families of the sailors who died.

This was totally foreseeable because there's plenty of research on the toxicity of smoke from burning oil facilities and city buildings (First Gulf War and 9/11).
The Trumpers ignore that kind of "woke" atmospheric and health information -- doesn't let them off the hook though.

About 20 years ago I did a summary of long-term studies of catastrophic pollution events like this, and on top of the obvious immediate impacts, I was alarmed to see the damage to mental health, along with cardiovascular effects, cancers, etc.
This is going to last for decades.

On top of this, my impacts summary for other such events (Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, 9/11) suggests that there are also considerable psychosocial effects. The stress resulting from these events can also strain mental health, cardiovascular conditions, etc.

"The research aims to evaluate which pollutants are present, at what levels, and where, and to assess the respiratory, neurological, cardiovascular, reproductive, and immune system impacts"
Full name: The Los Angeles Fire Human Exposure and Long-Term Health Study (L.A. Fire HEALTH Study)

A couple of decades I did a review paper looking at historical Mass Pollutant Release Events (MPREs), and I believe that the number of structures burned in LA would qualify as one given timeframe, scale, and sheer volume of toxic chemicals released

Long-Term Study on Health Impacts of Los Angeles Wildfires Launched In an unprecedented collective scientific effort to understand the short- and long-term health impacts of wildfires, researchers from four universities have launched a 10-year study of the Los Angeles...

"researchers from four universities have launched a 10-year study of the Los Angeles fires. The wildfires that began in early January 2025 killed 29 people, destroyed more than 16,000 structures, and exposed millions to toxic smoke"

Maybe this is what those word captchas from a decade or two ago were leading towards.
I've suspected this for awhile, but when I did a search on my laptop for a particular word, it flagged a screen cap (not text file) of a post including the word. So this OS is able to recognize stuff in images.

What the Thousand-Year Blood Reign Means for Gas Prices “Death toll in Middle East surpasses 1,100 as missile strikes continue.” — The Independent Gas prices continue to surge in the US, rising 14 perce...

"Unfortunately, the appearance of armies of the dead, awakened to wage indiscriminate war on all humankind, could potentially push gasoline beyond $3.50 per gallon."
www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/wha...

Happy National Napping Day from a few of our napping experts! 💤

Thoughtful analysis by Mike:
"The basis of Q, and why it was so compelling to so many people, was that the monsters were finally going to be brought down by Donald Trump, a figure of outsider wealth beholden to nobody except those who elected him."

And in Canada, here's how it manifested.

Not surprising that when faced with what feels like an overwhelming wave of misinformation, a lot of people feel like giving up. (Kind of like how my grandpa, a child in Japan, refused to look up when other kids were marvelling at Halley's Comet -- because he thought they were punking him.)

Him taking his grandkids into the creek with him -- it's awful. I hope they didn't get sick.