Using microfluidics techniques, the scientists produced microcapsules (photo, p. 12) that contain a liquid sorbent sodium carbonate solution combined with a catalyst that can absorb CO2 quickly. The microcapsules are made from a highly permeable silicone polymer material that allows CO2 molecules to pass through, but prevents the sorbent material from escaping. By forcing the sor-bent to remain in small droplets, the microcapsules can maximize the surface area that contacts CO2.

The permeable microbeads are inexpensive to make, easy to handle and produce minimal waste, the research-ers say, and with encapsulated fluids inside, they allow users to combine the advantages of solid and liquid CO2-capture media in the same system, while avoiding many of the environmental and corrosion issues posed by amine-based CO2 capture.

Microcapsules have been used in a variety of products previously, including pharmaceuticals, cosmetics and food, but the scientists say their work is the first demon-stration of the use of microcapsules in CO2 capture. The project was detailed in a research paper published in a recent issue of Nature Communications. The research-ers are working on enhancements that will allow scaleup of the technology.

Perfluorinated compounds may pose a risk to firefighters

Perfluorinated compounds firefighting foams such as perfluorooctane sulfonates (PFOS) have been used as fire suppressants, but some of them, such as perfluoroalkyl acids have been

associated with serious environmental contamination. Also, several new fluorinated surfactants have been developed lately, and there has been concern over the effect of those substances on wildlife and on firefight-ers who are most exposed to them. However, several of those new compounds have not yet been identified and it may be very difficult to identify them.

Now, a team from the University of Queensland (Bris-bane, Australia; www.uq.edu.au), rebro University (rebro, Sweden; www.oru.se), and Queensland Uni-versity of Technology (Brisbane, Australia; www.qut.edu.au) has developed a method borrowed from medi-cine for identifying those substances in the blood of firefighters. The team compared the fluorinated surfac-tants found in the blood of 20 firefighters with com-pounds in the blood of 20 people who had not been exposed to firefighting foams.

The team ran the blood samples through the tradi-tional quadrupole time-of-flight tandem mass spec-trometry (QTOF-MS/MS) and has identified more than 3,000 organic and fluorinated compounds. However, when the team applied a statistical analysis to the data, a clear distinction appeared between the firefighters and the controls. The team found nine fluorinated com-pounds in the firefighters blood, either exclusively or at much higher levels.

Only five of those compounds appeared in online chemi-cal databases or in the literature interpreting the MS data. The team has tentatively identified the other four, unknown compounds as sulfonic acids analogous to PFOS.

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