The 70% problem: what chlorine makes in our drinking water that we cannot identify Your water utility publishes a Consumer Confidence Report every year. It tells you the four regulated trihalomethanes were below 80 µg/L, the five regulated haloacetic acids were below 60 µg/L, and that the water is "safe." Every year, the same reassuring numbers. The case is closed.
Isomers that poison: when same mass, different shape, different toxicity In the previous post I described about how chlorination of 6PPD-quinone generates twelve transformation products (TPs), eleven of them chlorinated (Jiao et al., 2026). Eleven chlorinated TPs are not all the same molecule with one chlorine stuck on. They are mostly positional isomers — the chlorine atom is at a
6PPD-quinone: how a tire antioxidant became a salmon killer, and how scientists actually find it The salmon mystery For scientists studying the life cycle of US Pacific Northwest coho salmon (Oncorhynchus kisutch), one problem has been bothering the scientists: they observed that coho salmon usually dies in streams near human activities hours after exposure to rainstorms with no explanation. This is a big issue considering
Featured What is a Collision Cross Section (CCS), and why should environmental chemists care? Every environmental chemists are familiar with sugar-cube-in-Olympic-pool analogy, which generally goes this way: if we dissolve a sugar cube in an Olympic-size pool, the concentration of sugar comes down to 1.6 ppb (ug/L). For sensitive instruments the like of typical LC-MS or
