Bill Arnold

15 essential books to better understand climate change Professors at universities and colleges across the state say one of the best ways to understand climate change is simple: reading.

15 essential books to better understand climate change www.mprnews.org/story/2025/0...

EPA eliminates research and development office, begins layoffs The Environmental Protection Agency said Friday it is eliminating its research and development arm and reducing agency staff by thousands of employees.

The EPA has eliminated its research division, which for decades has provided the science behind regulations on clean air, clean water, and toxic chemicals.

The US can afford to monitor, research, and regulate the impacts of industries on human and environmental health. We are just choosing not to.

We are looking for a PhD student for a project on chloronitramide in drinking water. Please spread the word!

jobs.ethz.ch/job/view/JOP...

Circularity and Sustainability: A Course that Advances Critical Thinking and Teamwork via Art, Community, and Policy | Environmental Engineering Science An opportunity exists for circular resource use, decreasing environmental impact and economic risk and at the same time enhancing biodiversity and global standards of living. When viewed from the pers...

What happens when engineers and artists team up? Students (STEM, policy) learn new perspectives on issues and solutions. @aeesprofs.bsky.social doi.org/10.1089/ees.... #Openaccess

'Forever chemical' TFA found in all but one of tested UK rivers The long-term impact of the chemical on human health is still unclear and being researched.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board Resignation Statement Effective immediately, members of the Congressionally mandated Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board voted overwhelmingly to resign from the board, rather than endorse unprecedented actions that we beli...

The entire board tasked with overseeing the State Department's Fulbright Program has resigned — claiming political interference from the Trump admin.
 
The Board voted "overwhelmingly" to resign "rather than endorse unprecedented actions … impermissible under the law." substack.com/home/post/p-...

Sign-on campaign: Preserving Scientific Integrity in the PFAS Definition. Scientists raise concerns about ongoing efforts to redefine PFAS and potentially exclude certain fluorinated chemical subgroups from the widely accepted 2021 OECD definition. www.ipcp.ch/news/sign-on...

Here's how we know this EO is a SNEAKY sinister thing:

1. When Trump wants people to know about something, it is very public.
2. It was released on the Friday evening of a holiday weekend
3. Cloaked under piles of sciencey language
4. First thing this morning, loud and proud: RFK's vax rollback

Well deserved!!

Influence of Cleaning on Indoor Air Concentrations of Volatile and Semivolatile Organic Compounds in Residences Cleaning activities can affect indoor air composition long after the cleaning is completed. Utilizing data from detailed observational monitoring campaigns, conducted over 21 weeks, we explore the influence of cleaning activities in two normally occupied, single-family houses. To study emissions and chemistry, we quantified more than 200 volatile organic compounds (VOCs) using a proton-transfer reaction time-of-flight mass spectrometer and 52 semivolatile organic compounds (SVOCs) using a semivolatile thermal-desorption gas chromatograph. During regular professional home cleaning, we observed postcleaning concentration enhancements in ∼60% of measured VOCs and ∼80% of measured SVOCs. Most of these concentration enhancements were not clearly linked to either primary emission from cleaning products or secondary formation through reactive chemistry. Instead, we infer that shifts in the sorptive properties of indoor surfaces account for most of these observations. Cleaning-associated enhancements mostly ebbed within a few hours, with some VOCs and lower-volatility SVOCs persisting more than 5 h, longer than would be expected for removal of inert species by ventilation. The use of carpet cleaner was associated with direct emission of 2-butoxyethanol, which persisted at elevated concentrations for days after the initial event. Home cleaning is potentially relevant for the health of professional cleaners and residents.

Cleaning can be messy.

Cleaning indoor spaces can enhance the release of a chemicals with a range of volatility. Most persist for up to five hours in home testing.

While not an excuse to not clean the bathroom, research has implications for cleaning professionals.

pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10....

✅ ACTION ITEM ✅

The National Science Foundation is under attack.

Trump’s budget is moving to dismantle one of the great engines of U.S. innovation, education, and discovery.

The fight to save NSF is on—and now there’s a new home base to join the front lines (🧵 1/3):

www.savensf.com

🚨 EPA's Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee (#CASAC) is seeking nominations!

Experts in #air quality, #epidemiology, #toxicology, #riskassessment, and more are encouraged to apply.

🗓️ Deadline: June 2, 2025
🔗 casac.epa.gov
📧 Any questions please contact: yeow.aaron@epa.gov

#AEESP #EPA

NSF halts grant awards while staff do second review Action comes after DOGE team arrives at science agency

🧪

www.science.org/content/arti...

I was investigating PFAS. Then a doctor told me to put it in my eyes. Facing a painful and distracting case of dry eye, a reporter went looking for treatments. What she found was surprising.

Fluorochemical eyedrops!

www.startribune.com/i-was-invest...

Group Leader in Experimental Atmospheric Chemistry

We are searching for a Group Leader in Experimental Atmospheric Chemistry! You can find details in the link; please share with qualified colleagues! jobs.ethz.ch/job/view/JOP...

Check out the Three Rivers Park District's Wandering Naturalist podcasts on neonicotinoids (epsidoes 237-239) www.threeriversparks.org/podcast

Episode 239 is about our work on neonics in MN waters.

This article does a great job describing the lives of young American scientists:

“You roll up your sleeves, try to make or discover something useful and then let the scientific community try to punch holes in your work to make sure that it’s sound”

People have no understanding of the enormous avoided health costs that EPA has made possible. The Clean Air Act alone has paid for all of EPA's costs by a factor of nearly 100.

Seriously, it’s hard to overstate the importance of the work these EPA scientists do and how devastating their firing would be to public health. So much of what we know about #PFAS, for example, and many of the methods used to detect these toxic chemicals are thanks to these researchers’ work.

Trump Administration Aims to Eliminate E.P.A.’s Scientific Research Arm (Gift Article) More than 1,000 chemists, biologists and other scientists could be laid off under a plan to dismantle the Office of Research and Development.

The air quality and health models I have used throughout my career have emerged from EPA’s Office of Research and Development. Shuttering it would be a devastating loss.
www.nytimes.com/2025/03/17/c...

Welcome to the Bluesky account for Stand Up for Science 2025!

Keep an eye on this space for updates, event information, and ways to get involved. We can't wait to see everyone #standupforscience2025 on March 7th, both in DC and locations nationwide!

#scienceforall #sciencenotsilence

@aeesprofs.bsky.social is now on BlueSky!

Opinion | American Science is Under Attack (Gift Article) The Trump administration hobbles research and endangers the public health.

An absolutely scorching OpEd by Harold Varmus, Nobel laureate, on Trump's destruction of the vaunted US scientific & biomedical enterprise & on Trump's kooky picks to lead the US health & science agencies

Gift link to share far & wide

www.nytimes.com/2025/02/14/o...

Desirée Plata: Chemist, oceanographer, engineer, entrepreneur MIT professor is passionate about reducing the chemical industry’s impact on the environment and human health

MIT professor Desirée Plata designs novel materials to tackle challenging environmental problems and has cofounded two climate- and energy-related start-ups: Moxair and Nth Cycle. cen.acs.org/people/profi... #chemsky🧪 #scinews

Map of the world color-coded by the percent of HgOH going on to make HG(II) compounds. The Schrodinger equation is depicted below Africa.

BrHgOH molecule on a layer of water molecules (meant to represent the top layer of the surface of ice).

OH radical donating a hydrogen bond to acetaldehyde (ethanal).

I’m looking for new PhD students wanting to use computational chemistry to study atmospheric reactions. Topics: Hg redox reactions at surfaces. AI to study how hydrogen bonds (R=O--HO• and RO(H)--HO) affects kinetics of H-abstraction.
See www.esf.edu/faculty/dibble or tsdibble@esf.edu

Trump's NIH Freeze Puts Scientific Research at Risk America’s best scientific minds are scrambling to determine the impact of the disruption.

Some thoughts on the confusion and anxiety created by the current freeze on communications, hiring, grant reviews, travel, etc at NIH (gift link):

Hidden among the Trump administration's first week assault on the American people is withdrawing the long-awaited EPA proposal on PFAS (forever chemicals) effluent limits in drinking #water.

www.ewg.org/news-insight...

Looks like NSF panels are getting paused

Sewerdle

here to fill the tiktok void in your life: sewerdle.neorsd.org

Unaffordable - The absurd cost of ‘PFAS as usual’ Almost every PFAS molecule ever synthesised is still out there. Some do break down – but into new PFAS.

The costs of PFAS remediation: The more #PFAS are used and spread, the more the #health and #remediation costs. We conducted remediation cost estimates for soil, water, sludge and leachate for the EU27 countries, Norway, Iceland, Switzerland and the UK:

foreverpollution.eu/lobbying/the...