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.

Mercury Moss Project

Rachel and I are working on a mercury moss project that deals with determining the amount of airborne mercury near an incinerator that's located near us. This project was first brought up to us by Dr.Anthony Carpi, he’s a professor at John Jay College in New York, and he had already performed this experiment so he was here at the museum with us last week helping us with our project. Today, we got our gloves on and started working with Lynne and she helped us rinse containers with mild ivory soap, which the containers we rinsed will be filled with distilled water and the sphagnum moss will soak in this distilled water for 24 hours. Once we did that we closed the container with its lid that was also rinsed with the ivory soap. For the poles that will be placed on the sites located in our map, we made measurements on the poles to indicate where we wanted the construction shop to drill the holes, the shorter pole that goes across the longer pole is 14 inches long and will have a ¼ inch hole through it to attach it to the longer pole, and it will have 2 ⅛ inch holes on each side of it to have the strings go through them and hold the moss. I drew a picture of how the poles should look like to give to the construction shop, and these poles are going to be placed near residents home that live near the incinerator, so Rachel and I also made phone calls to these residents in order to get their permission to place these moss samples. I’m super excited for the turn out of this project, I feel like the initiation of this project is off to a great start.

Moss Project

Me and Brigitte are doing an internship that is focusing on the amount of mercury in the air around the incinerator in New Haven. We will be placing poles with moss bags attached to them around the East Haven area. The bags are going to capture whatever is in the air allowing us to now how much mercury is in the air. So far we have prepared the moss and are making adjustments to the poles. Our first step was to make sure everything was clean. To accomplish this we used distilled water and ivory soap. The next step was to place the moss in a container filled with distilled water. After we did this we made phone calls to make arrangements with some Evo kids about placing our poles around their homes. Once we complete the prep work, we will hang the poles and leave them for 3 weeks. Once the moss is collected we are going  to take a trip to visit Dr. Carpi. Our project is based on his research. He is a professor at John Jay College of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry. He was kind enough to offer us guidance for this project and is even doing the analyzing for us.