Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon

Yeah, this is absolutely a very important topic that we have not been paying enough attention to.

As you said, this PM2.5, this is extremely small particles in the haze, and they contain all kinds of substances, including this polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon, in short, PAH, and also some heavy metals.

So in a similar way that haze, PM2.5 particles are affecting our respiratory tract.

When they attach to the food, when we ingest the food, it will also affect our body system.

The real worry is about those microplastics which are smaller than 10 micrometers.

And so those microplastics would then be able to cross the intestinal barrier and move into circulation, where they will cause all kinds of damage that we've been talking about.

And likewise, for the HACE PM2.5 particles, since they are even smaller than 10 microns, micrometer, they will be able to close intestinal barrier and then all these organic compounds like PAH that we mentioned earlier, they will be sticking to the organ, be it liver or heart or internal organs.

They will induce oxidative stress and then cause damage.

MycoMine is what we call a bioremediation company, which means that we develop and provide biological solutions to treatment of different kinds of environmental pollutions.

And we work mainly with oil-based pollutions, um, such as fuels, et cetera, but also more complex molecules like PFAS, the forever chemicals, PAHs, and so on.

And you use specifically fungi to do this?

Yeah, we work mainly with fungus, and we have over the years built up a biobank of different kinds of, uh, uh, fungal isolates or fungal, uh, species that are specialized to different kinds of pollution.

And I will say, you know, I'm not a microbiologist either, but I worked with a microbiologist at Tech, and she was able to do some analyses of the soil from the microbial aspect.

And we looked at a gene expression that microbes will release when they're dealing with a type of hydrocarbons, PAHs, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, probably a bit much.

Interesting.

But that's a type of hydrocarbon, right? Yes.

So they looked at.

the PAHs, just PAHs, on the apparatus truck and clothing and did estimates.

And they came to the conclusion that of 100,000 people, 230 of them could get cancer from just touching a dirty apparatus over a 25-year period.

And then 360 of them could get cancer from just wearing contaminated clothing.

I just use that term because it's all-encompassing.

They looked at different risk reduction modalities, things like gross deconning on scene, having the engineer put their SEBA on, which is huge.

I know that you guys talked about that also, um, that was showing a 40% reduction in inhalation of PAHs on scene.

Um, and I think they also did a, oh, you know what, this is what it was.

Water, on the other hand, was largely unaffected, retaining its usual compaction and crystallization sequence, aside from some persistent dangling OH features.

Comparisons with JWST ice spectra toward protostars and dense clouds suggest grain surface structure may contribute to observed band diversity, motivating substrate-aware models.

Number nine, Beyond Idealized PAHs, Infrared Signatures of Carbon Chain Defects from Shock Synthesis, by Tan et al.

on the Archive.

Standard interpretations of the aromatic infrared bands assume, largely, idealized planar molecules, but interstellar PAHs likely form in pretty energetic environments, and this could result in alteration of those idealized structures.

Here, two-stage reactive molecular dynamics simulations condense carbon and hydrogen atoms onto a cold graphene dust grain proxy and then heat the precursors to mimic warm conditions caused perhaps by shocks.

The products are curved skeletons with five- and six-membered rings and dangling linear carbon chains.

Simulations run under hydrogen-poor conditions actually result in fullerene-like shapes.

So the other thing that I, I wanted to like highlight on this one is that grill- like marshmallows in general, depending on how, how much, how hot they get really, can, can be also a, a problem from a risk standpoint.

So there, there was an article that was published in Molecules in 2024 about polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in grilled marshmallows.

And kinda diving into that.

Oh, wow.

So while I was identifying all these wetland species, I wanted to work with our traditional healers to find out where they go to pick in Alka-Sasne because of the high levels of contamination from fluoride, from PCBs, from

PAHs, whatever, whatever.

So what ended up happening was

they would go out in the field with me.

And we would collect soil samples.

And the soil samples we had analyzed for

PAHs.

In areas where the PAH levels were high, we We're able to recollect plants