(Press-News.org) One sweaty, huffing, exercising person emits as many chemicals from their body as up to five sedentary people, according to a new University of Colorado Boulder study. And notably, those human emissions, including amino acids from sweat or acetone from breath, chemically combine with bleach cleaners to form new airborne chemicals with unknown impacts to indoor air quality.
"Humans are a large source of indoor emissions," said Zachary Finewax, CIRES research scientist and lead author of the new study out in the current edition of Indoor Air. "And chemicals in indoor air, whether from our bodies or cleaning products, don't just disappear, they linger and travel around spaces like gyms, reacting with other chemicals."
In 2018, the CU Boulder team outfitted a weight room in the Dal Ward Athletic Center--a campus facility for university student athletes, from weightlifters to cheerleaders--with a suite of air-sampling equipment. Instruments collected data from both the weight room and supply air, measuring a slew of airborne chemicals in real time before, during and after workouts of CU athletes. The team found the athletes' bodies produced 3-5 times the emissions while working out, compared to when they were at rest.
"Using our state-of-the-art equipment, this was the first time indoor air analysis in a gym was done with this high level of sophistication. We were able to capture emissions in real time to see exactly how many chemicals the athletes were emitting, and at what rate," said Demetrios Pagonis, postdoctoral researcher at CIRES and co-author on the new work.
Many gym facilities frequently use chlorine bleach-based products to sanitize sweaty equipment. And while these cleaning products work to kill surface bacteria--they also combine with emissions from sweat--mixing to form a new cocktail of chemicals.
The team was the first to observe a chemical group called N-chloraldimines--a reaction product of bleach with amino acids--in gym air. That meant chlorine from bleach cleaner sprayed onto equipment was reacting with the amino acids released from sweating bodies, the authors report.
And although more research is needed to determine specific impacts this might have on indoor air quality, chemically similar reaction products of ammonia with bleach can be harmful to human health.
"Since people spend about 90 percent of our time indoors, it's critical we understand how chemicals behave in the spaces we occupy," said Joost de Gouw, CIRES Fellow, professor of chemistry at CU Boulder and corresponding author on the paper. Although the researchers collected all data for this study pre-pandemic, the team says their results illustrate that a modern gym with low occupancy and good ventilation may still be relatively safe for a workout, especially if masks are used.
INFORMATION:
"Quantification and source characterization of volatile organic compounds from exercising and application of chlorine?based cleaning products in a university athletic center" published in Wiley's Indoor Air on December 18, 2020. Authors include: Zachary Finewax (CIRES, CU Boulder Chemistry), Demetrios Pagonis (CIRES, CU Boulder Chemistry), Megan S. Claflin (Aerodyne Research), Anne V. Handschy (CIRES, CU Boulder Chemistry), Wyatt L. Brown (CIRES, CU Boulder Chemistry), Olivia Jenks (CIRES, CU Boulder Chemistry), Benjamin A. Nault (CIRES, CU Boulder Chemistry), Douglas A. Day (CIRES, CU Boulder Chemistry), Brian M. Lerner (Aerodyne Research), Jose L. Jimenez (CIRES, CU Boulder Chemistry), Paul J. Ziemann (CIRES, CU Boulder Chemistry), Joost A. de Gouw (CIRES, CU Boulder Chemistry).
The authors gratefully acknowledge the Sloan Foundation for funding the measurements and instrumentation used in this study, and the CU Boulder Dal Ward Athletic Center for the use of their facilities to collect all data for this work.
Heating up cancer cells while targeting them with chemotherapy is a highly effective way of killing them, according to a new study led by UCL researchers.
The study, published in the Journal of Materials Chemistry B, found that "loading" a chemotherapy drug on to tiny magnetic particles that can heat up the cancer cells at the same time as delivering the drug to them was up to 34% more effective at destroying the cancer cells than the chemotherapy drug without added heat.
The magnetic iron oxide nanoparticles that carry the chemotherapy drug shed heat when exposed to an alternating magnetic field. This means that, once the nanoparticles have accumulated in the tumour area, an alternating magnetic field can be applied from outside the ...
Researchers in Japan have made the first observations of biological magnetoreception - live, unaltered cells responding to a magnetic field in real time. This discovery is a crucial step in understanding how animals from birds to butterflies navigate using Earth's magnetic field and addressing the question of whether weak electromagnetic fields in our environment might affect human health.
"The joyous thing about this research is to see that the relationship between the spins of two individual electrons can have a major effect on biology," said Professor Jonathan Woodward from the University of Tokyo, who conducted the research with doctoral ...
Two studies from the University of Copenhagen show that Danes aren't quite as good as Chinese at discerning bitter tastes. The research suggests that this is related to anatomical differences upon the tongues of Danish and Chinese people.
For several years, researchers have known that women are generally better than men at tasting bitter flavours. Now, research from the University of Copenhagen suggests that ethnicity may also play a role in how sensitive a person is to the bitter taste found in for example broccoli, Brussels sprouts and dark chocolate. By letting test subjects taste the bitter substance PROP, two studies demonstrate that Danish and Chinese people experience this basic taste differently. The reason seems to be related to an anatomical difference upon ...
A recent study by prof. Tone Bjørge, University of Bergen, and her team shows that thyroid cancer is related to in-utero exposures.
Thyroid cancer is diagnosed at a younger age than most other malignancies and the incidence is higher in women than men.
"The only established modifiable risk factors for thyroid cancer are childhood exposure to ionizing radiation and obesity. Few in-utero and early life risk factors have so far been identified" says Bjørge, professor at Department of Global Public Health and Primary Care, University of Bergen.
Maternal hypothyroidism, hyperthyroidism, goiter, and benign thyroid neoplasms ...
BEER-SHEVA, Israel...January 5, 2021 - Reopening Florida elementary and high schools in September was followed by increased COVID-19 infections, according to data analyzed by Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Harvard Medical School and Tel Aviv University researchers.
The findings were just published in END ...
Researchers at Paderborn University have developed a new method of distance measurement for systems such as GPS, which achieves more precise results than ever before. Using quantum physics, the team led by Leibniz Prize winner Professor Christine Silberhorn has successfully overcome the so-called resolution limit, which causes the "noise" we may see in photos, for example. Their findings have just been published in the academic journal "Physical Review X Quantum" (PRX Quantum). In "Physics", the publisher's online magazine, the paper has also been highlighted with an expert Viewpoint - an honour which is given to only certain selected publications.
Physicist Dr Benjamin Brecht explains the problem of the resolution limit: "In laser distance measurements ...
Assessing the ability of unresponsive patients with severe brain injury to understand what is being said to them could yield important insights into how they might recover, according to new research.
A team at the University of Birmingham has shown that responses to speech can be measured using electroencephalography, a non-invasive technique used to record electrical signals in the brain. The strength of these responses can be used to provide an accurate prognosis that can help clinicians make the most effective treatment decisions.
Significantly the assessments can be made while the patient is still in intensive care and does not require any conscious response from the patient - they do not have to ...
Brain metastases can only develop if cancer cells first exit the fine blood vessels and enter into the brain tissue. To facilitate this step, cancer cells influence blood clotting, as Heidelberg scientists from the German Cancer Research Center and from Heidelberg University Hospital have now been able to show in mice. The cancer cells actively promote the formation of clots, which helps them to arrest in the brain capillaries and then penetrate through the vessel wall. Drugs that inhibit the clotting factor thrombin were able to reduce the number of brain metastases in this experimental model.
Brain metastases are a feared complication of advanced cancers. Different cancers differ in their tendency to colonize the brain. Advanced-stage melanoma ...
A recent study finds that, while youth think all bullying is bad, non-immigrant adolescents object less to bullying when the victim is an immigrant. However, the study found that the more contact immigrant and non-immigrant children had with each other, the more strongly they objected to bullying.
"We know that bystanders can play a key role in stopping bullying, and wanted to better understand bystander responses to bias-based bullying," says Seçil Gönülta?, first author of the study and a Ph.D. student at North Carolina State University. "What role does a victim's background play? What role does the bystander's background play? Are children more or less likely to intervene if they come from different backgrounds?"
To explore these questions, the researchers ...
BOSTON - Findings from the Nurses' Health Study, one of the longest running studies of women's health, show that five diet and lifestyle factors, including regular exercise, can make a significant impact on gastroesophageal reflux (GERD) or heartburn symptoms. GERD is a common condition, affecting about a third of the U.S. population; the main symptom is heartburn and it is often managed with medications. This new study suggests, however, that following diet and lifestyle guidelines may reduce symptoms substantially and could make medication unnecessary for some patients. It was published as a letter in JAMA Internal Medicine.
The five factors include normal weight, never smoking, moderate-to-vigorous physical activity for at least 30 minutes daily, restricting coffee, tea ...
