Steps Of Mercury Moss Project

The first steps taken into this project was collecting all of our materials and rinse them with ivory soap and distilled water. Once we got the moss we washed its container with the ivory soap and it soaked in distilled water for 24 hours. Next, we drained the distilled water and rinsed it again and soaked it again in distilled water for 5 more hours. Then, we washed the hairnets with ivory soap and rinsed them and they were left to dry outside along with the moss also being dried outdoors, making sure it doesn’t get near any metals or old buildings. We screwed the pipes together and attached the strings to them where the moss is going to be hanging. Later on, we measured the moss and we stuffed them into the hairnets making sure each sample was three grams, we used an elastic band to tie the hair net. We went off to the sites and placed the poles first, and attached the moss samples the next day because we wanted the moss samples to be outside on the same day. We placed the samples in peoples yard, we even had the opportunity to place one at a park with a sign next to it explaining why these poles are being placed around the area. Our next step is to check on our samples and collect them once the three weeks are up.

Summary Of Mercury Moss Project

Sphagnum moss is being used to determine to amount of airborne mercury is being released. We're using moss mainly because it can absorb the mercury in the air effeciently, its inexpensive and it doesn't consume any type of energy. The main source of the mercury can potentially be coming from a waste incinerator. PVC pipes are going to placed in peoples yard with the moss attached to them to collect any mercury found in the air. A shorter pipe will be attached to the longer pipe horizontally and have strings on each side so the hairnets with the moss inside can be tied with the strings with an elastic band. While placing the pipes we kept in mind that where we’re suppose to place the pipes has to be a place where there aren’t any trees, metals nearby, and good exposure to wind. The samples are going to be on sites for about three weeks and we’re going to collect the samples and send them to Dr.Carpi’s lab in John Jay College in New York. The moss will be tested in the lab and we will wait to get our results back.

First Impression: Mercury Moss Project

My first impression of this project was that this project is one of the most important research I’ve ever done. My project ties in with a lot of important topics, from public health, ecosystems, and to improving air quality. Collecting background information and using it for this project to elaborate on how this experiment is important to our environment was a little challenging. Once Rachel and I started to make phone calls to ask permission to use peoples yard to place our moss samples and explaining our project to them, it made talking about the project easier. This project is so relevant to us because it can affect our surroundings and ourselves. It affects the living organisims in the water and us consumers as well, which can lead to major health issues. By doing this project we’re going to determine the amount of airborne mercury that is actually being released from the waste incinerator, which I think is pretty mind blowing because we’re going to get these results back so we'll be informed how much mercury we are being exposed too. I'm really confident about this project now, and when I was first assigned to this project I was nervous, yet excited. I think this project is going to be a success.

First Impressions

When I first started this internship I thought it was going to be a lot of work. There was so many words that were complicated and hard to understand. There was a lot of reading which is something I normally don’t enjoy. But I knew that I was going to learn a lot from this project and be able to do something really cool.I knew that it was a really interesting topic but thought that I wouldn’t be able to handle the work that went along with it.The project seemed like a lot overall, there was going to be phone calls,emails, field work, etc., some of the things being harder than others. I was dreading the field work the most. I was worried that it was going to be extremely hot when we went out to plant the moss and I didn’t want to do it. But then when time actually came to doing it, it wasn't so bad and I actually enjoyed it. My views on the internship were somewhat right at the start, it was going to be a lot of work but I’m enjoying it more than I thought would. We are doing a lot of communicating. We explain our project to people often and seem to be getting better at it as we go along. Overall my initial views on the internship weren't all correct because I am having much more fun than I thought I would!

Mercury Moss Procedure

The procedure for our internship is pretty simple. The first step was to make sure that everything was clean. We washed the buckets, hairnets, and containers with ivory soap, rinsed with tap water, and then rinsed them again with distilled water. After making sure everything was clean we washed the moss with distilled water  and placed it in the cleaned container. We then filled the container up half way with distilled water and submerged the moss in it. We soaked the moss  for 24 hours, rinsed it and soaked again for 5 hours. We let the moss dry completely and then placed 3g of moss into the each hairnet with 35 in total. Before we could go out and hang the moss bags to the poles, we had to actually assemble them. We made poles in a T formation and attached strings to the sides for the moss to hang down. We also made a mark 10 inches from the bottom of the pole to know how deep to place it into the ground. Once the poles were made and the moss was ready to be hanged we went to our locations in East Haven and planted them. The poles will stay up for 3 weeks and then we gather the moss and send it to be analyzed.

Mercury Internship Summary

So far in my internship we have made tons of progress. We have planted our poles with the moss bags attached to them at each of our locations in East Haven. We are leaving them moss bags out for 3 weeks, letting them absorb mercury that is in the air. The goal of the project is to determine how much airborne mercury is being released around this location. We have placed our poles within a 2 kilometer range of the waste incinerator in East Haven. The moss we used is Sphagnum moss, it is really porous which makes it great for absorbing pollutants in the air. Mercury can affect humans in many ways. It can cause neurological damage especially to children (fetuses and infants). Mercury is known to cause impaired motor skills, muscle atrophy, and at high exposures kidney failure. Overall the effects of mercury are not a good thing and can really affect our way of life which is why we are doing this project. We want to make sure that mercury is not being released so that people do not have to go through these things. We have learned a lot of mercury and really see that it does affect us and isn't some imaginary thing.  Getting everything done for our project has been a long process. From washing and cleaning our supplies to making phone calls and sending out emails. We even are getting a chance to work with Dr. Carpi. Like I mentioned before in my other blog post, he is a professor at John Jay College in New York who was super nice and agreed to do the analysis for us. He originally did this project and we are replicating it. We will be visiting him in August and seeing his lab. Earlier in June he even came down and taught us about the project and mercury in general. He has done a lot of work with mercury so for him to be doing this with us is really big!

Gentner Lab- Summer 2015

        This summer, Vanessa and I are interning at Mason Laboratory, in the lab of Dr. Drew Gentner. We are focusing on air quality, especially in respect to the VOCs (volatile organic compounds) in the atmosphere, which are organic compounds that evaporate easily at normal temperatures. Scientists care about these substances in the air because they can have negative implications for both human and environmental health.  With the former, exposure, whether short-term or long-term, to these compounds can increase people's risk of certain health issues, and with the latter, these compounds, if combined with nitrogen oxides, react to form ozone in the troposphere, contributing to climate change, and thus, acting as dangerous air pollutants. These substances can be emitted from a number of different sources, and the main ones we are exploring and testing this summer are anthropogenic (human-caused, e.g. vehicle emissions) sources, biogenic (natural, e.g. from trees) sources, mixed emissions, and indoor environments. In the lab this summer, we will be assisting in collecting air samples from 1-2 of each type of source here in New Haven, in hopes that, after analyzing these  samples along with others working in the lab, we can get a better idea of the contents of the air we breathe everyday.
          The first part of our work in the lab, which we started with this week, is actually constructing the devices used to collect the air samples. This involves strategically "packing" glass thermal desorption tubes with three main types of absorbent materials, which will actually trap the different compounds as we pump air through them at our 4 or 5 chosen locations around the area, and after we collect enough samples from these locations, we will learn how to actually analyze them. Overall, these next few weeks in Dr. Gentner's lab will be very fun and enlightening, and I look forward to the work we will be doing.