{"id":49996,"date":"2024-08-08T11:37:53","date_gmt":"2024-08-08T10:37:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.innovationnewsnetwork.com\/?p=49996"},"modified":"2024-08-08T11:37:53","modified_gmt":"2024-08-08T10:37:53","slug":"forever-chemical-pollution-can-now-be-tracked","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.innovationnewsnetwork.com\/forever-chemical-pollution-can-now-be-tracked\/49996\/","title":{"rendered":"Forever chemical pollution can now be tracked"},"content":{"rendered":"
Tracking forever chemical pollution involves passing samples through a strong magnetic field and then reading the burst of radio waves their atoms emit.<\/p>\n
This reveals the composition of carbon isotopes in the molecule and gives the chemical its fingerprint, a feat that had not previously been achieved with forever chemicals.<\/p>\n
According to Cornelia Rasmussen, a research assistant professor at the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics at the Jackson School of Geosciences, the work is important because it allows scientists to track the spread of forever chemicals in the environment.<\/p>\n
The super strong molecular bonds that give forever chemicals their handy characteristics \u2014 which are put to use in everything from fire retardants to non-stick surfaces and slow-release drugs \u2014 also keep them from breaking down in the environment, causing them to build up as pollution in soil and organic material to which they easily stick.<\/p>\n
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency plans to regulate forever chemical pollution, which includes PFAS, and eliminate most of it from drinking water<\/a>.<\/p>\n However, the molecular bonds of the chemicals also make them difficult to trace. Conventional chemical fingerprinting involves breaking molecules apart in a mass spectrometer, which doesn\u2019t work well with the tough molecular bonds of forever chemicals.<\/p>\n Instead, the researchers turned to a technology called nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy, which measures a molecule\u2019s structure and identifies its isotopes without breaking it apart.<\/p>\n Isotopes refer to chemical elements with differences in the number of neutrons in their atoms. Forever chemicals are made by bonding carbon isotopes to the element fluorine, which almost never happens in nature. Once the molecular bonds form, they are virtually unbreakable.<\/p>\nDetermining a mix of carbon isotopes<\/h3>\n