H2O Member | Thu Aug 27, 2020 | 10:43 AM | Likes: 0 

Aquarium Water Research for Fish Enthusiasts

Categories: Tech, Education | Pubby Cash Received:  0

The history of people keeping fish in aquariums has been over 4000 years, which can be traced back to the ancient China in royal families. Just like other pet animals, those people kept fish as a hobby or for ornamentation purposes. Experiences passed down from one generation to another with regard to the fish keeping techniques, such as when to change water and how to keep fish healthy. A business of raising fish in large scale was derived from it, as fish became a food and was found nutritious and delicious. This is called aquaculture. Aquaculture and ornamental fish keeping mainly differ in two aspects: (1) Fish health and welfare are not that much cared by the fish farmer compared to the fish enthusiasts maintaining their aquariums at home; and (2) Fish farmers care most about the payback - the time required to recover the cost of investment by fish production, while the fish enthusiasts do not have such a concern. However, they do have one belief in common: the water quality needs to good. Water for fish is just like the air for human. Poisonous air can kill a human, and poisonous water can kill a fish. As science and technologies greatly advanced since the 20th century, people have spent a significant amount of efforts investigating the health and welfare of human - for sure this is of the most importance because we are the humans. However, less efforts have been spent on fish health and welfare and there are a lot of questions remain unknown. For example, what water is considered as poisonous for fish? For humans, we have investigated thousands of water quality parameters and defined the threshold values above which are considered poisonous. Do we have such threshold values for fish keeping in aquariums and aquaculture? For humans, we know we could be sick under certain atmospheric conditions such as breathing in carbon monoxide, pm2.5, organic chemical vapors, and so on and we understand the mechanisms how they affect our body. For fish, do we know if fish shows symptoms of side swimming (fish swims tilted on its side), rapid swim velocity and deformities, what are the correlated water quality parameters? For humans, we know we have medicines to treat our illness and have environmental engineers to maintain our living environment. For fish, do we have medicines to treat fish illness and have experts to design water treatment systems to maintain a healthy water environment for aquariums and aquaculture? The answers to the latter questions regarding fish are generally no. Due to this huge research gap, I have started developing a line of research from perspectives of an environmental engineer on investigating how water quality parameters are changed as aquarium water ages and what could be the water treatment technologies that can be applied to aquariums and aquaculture to achieve a goal of balancing treatment effectiveness, water footprint, and economic savings. My first manuscript on this topic will be submitted for journal publication soon. ...  Read more

H2O Member | Tue Aug 18, 2020 | 12:37 AM | Likes: 1 

What Can I Do on COVID-19?

Categories: Tech, Education | Pubby Cash Received:  0

I have participated in two meetings on soliciting COVID-19 research ideas hosted by the IUP research institute and the Indiana Borough. There appears to be a national campaign on exploring wastewater epidemiology - quantification of COVID-19 viruses (i.e. SARS-COV-2 virus) in wastewater and projection of infected people in a community. And the meetings are all about it. I highly doubt this is feasible: (1) There are concentration problems when wastewater samples are processed for viruses (Calgua et al. 2020). This is not like laboratory reagent water isolation. The environmental applications, especially in wastewater matrix, are quite complicated; (2) Even if some viruses are successfully discovered from a wastewater sample, the results from the current real-time quantitative PCR (RT-qPCR) technology give RNA copies with a sensitivity as low as 5 RNA copies per reaction. It is not the count of infectious live viruses, but the non-infectious dead viruses. Such data will lead to over-estimation of the infected people if improperly interpreted; (3) Scientists have reported PCR inhibition problems during detection of the SARS-COV-2 virus (Kitajima et al. 2020). All of these above-mentioned problems will make the sensitivity and reliability of SARS-COV-2 quantification an issue. For a reliable control, another virus that is expected not present in the wastewater could be spiked into the sample, and go through the same concentration, isolation, and PCR processes as the target SARS-COV-2 virus. Enteric viruses such as murine norovirus and mengovirus, which are both single-stranded RNA viruses like the SARS-COV-2, could serve as the spike virus, but none of studies has investigated this so far. As far as what I could contribute to this kind of pandemic-related research problems with my expertise, I mentioned in the meetings a possible approach of exploring presence/absence test kits for wastewater SARS-COV-2 quick testing, expand the testing capability at different campus buildings and different time periods, and utilizing such data to obtain useful information. However, as I have been doing further research on such preliminary idea, it does not seem possible at current stage, as there is no established protocols on such test for SARS-COV-2, even for the viral surrogates. The training and protection of student workers for sampling wastewater are also an issue during the pandemic. Thus, I've decided to move on towards other plans. As my literature research goes on deeper and deeper, I've found tons of published papers on COVID-19 in the environmental field coming out just in the past 4-5 months and it is very important I don't miss such a opportunity of filling these huge and numerous research gaps at current stage. Combining with my expertise, I'm thinking of (1) figuring out the unit water or wastewater treatment processes for additional log reduction of viruses. This would be a literature study based on the published data on viral inactivation kinetics during different types of experimental conditions; and (2) conducting a computational analysis based on the global, national, and regional data. The machine learning techniques can be used in this case for projection and interpretation...  Read more

H2O Member | Thu Aug 06, 2020 | 10:12 AM | Likes: 1 

How to Deal With Late Night Fire Alarms

Categories: General | Pubby Cash Received:  0

It could be any time that your carbon monoxide (smoke) detectors go off, and it is of great nuisance when this alarm appears between 1 am - 5 am! We have just experienced such an alarm at 5 am today when everyone is asleep. There is no smoke, no fire, definitely nothing as I inspected the house. It is an false alarm! Don't be panic! The alarm circuit cannot last forever. Most manufacturers will desensitize/reset it for up to 8 minutes. If there is indeed no smoke, no fire, the alarm will go away by itself. Just be patient. If you have to step in physically to solve the problem, you will need to find the initiating unit first. It is the one that is flashing red or green at least once every second while in alarm mode, and then push the Test/Hush button, which can be used repeatedly until the air has been cleared of the condition causing the alarm. If the alarm stopped on its own before you could find that flashing light, you will need to refer to the owner's manual to see if the alarm model has a memory to tell you which unit was initiating. Since false alarms are commonly triggered by something interfering the sensor, to clean the sensor, you need to disconnect the alarm, remove any removable battery, hold the unit by its edge and thoroughly vaccum out the gap between the front cover and the back plate all the way around the perimeter with the crevice tool attachment of a vacuum cleaner, or blow through the same gap with compressed air. If you need to reset the unit after a battery replacement, make sure you press and hold the test button after a new battery is installed. The unit will chirp once when the power is restored, and should not chirp afterwards. Under no circumstances should you remove the battery to silence the alarms. You will need the real alarm in future, or it will cost your life. Well, what is the reason for the false alarm we got today? Maybe we had a detector became faulty; air humidity was high; or there were substances in the air that caused fumes. We tend to believe the humidity in the air was the reason for our case. We fell asleep with windows open and it was raining outside. In some area of the house, the moisture could be aggregated and in this area there happened to be a smoke detector. ...  Read more

H2O Member | Mon Aug 03, 2020 | 12:44 PM | Likes: 1 

Face-to-Face (F2F) or Distance Learning for Fall 2020

Categories: Education | Pubby Cash Received:  0

The Fall semester is approaching, but some schools are still undecided on the appropriate approaches of teaching, at least for IUP. It should be a no brainer by just looking at the ways that Harvard and Cambridge have decided. These high-ranked research universities all go with distance learning to protect their faculty and students. I would say this is a smart and responsible decision. However, when it comes to the low-ranked universities, economic complexities will sway the decision towards F2F instruction, because the administration is afraid that distance learning will decrease the enrollment and harm the university income. Since the high-ranked research universities usually have large endowment, we can see the correct decision can be made when there are no financial stresses. The question is "money and health, which one is more important? " For the unprecedented virus that people still know little about, it is not just a health issue, it could take your life if your genes (not ages) have decided you are the most vulnerable group of persons to this virus. For people who were infected and recovered, the sequela are still unknown and the health impact could be life-long. The most recent update from IUP was that new freshmen are required to be on campus and the given reason is that college life acclimation. It is obvious that it is not the real reason. In the meanwhile, faculty members are required to teach no more than 80% of their courses online while at least 20% has to be F2F, unless a course has been applied for as a distance learning course. Although faculty members have expressed deep concerns through their union, their voices appear negligible. Given current circumstances, It is really tough for me to decide how my five courses are delivered this coming Fall semester. ...  Read more

H2O Member | Wed Jul 29, 2020 | 11:31 PM | Likes: 1 

COVID-19 Testing in Wastewater - P/A Test Kit in Urgent Need

Categories: Tech | Pubby Cash Received:  0

It has been found that people who are infected with COVID-19 shed the virus in their stool even before they show any symptoms. This generates a necessity of establishing a wastewater surveillance program of testing wastewater periodically and mapping the results to the number of infected people by predictions. I am invited to participate in such a program today for the Borough of Indiana. As the fall semester is approaching, the Borough and the University are worried about the outbreak in a second wave as students are returning to campus from all over the country. In today's Zoom meeting, I proposed to collect time-series of raw wastewater samples from the residence halls and academic buildings, and then to test the presence of the COVID-19 virus in the samples. With sufficient numbers of binary data on presence and absence, an approach of using statistical tools combined with the data on the numbers of people who are using the buildings will be able to give projections on the number of infected people. This sounds promising. However, the problem is how to quickly do the testing with the raw wastewater samples? There is no test kit available so far. According to this EPA webpage, such standard method of concentrating and quantifying SARS-CoV-2 with molecular and live, or infectious, assays in wastewater is still under development. With regard to the non-standard methods, the MedRxiv has this paper, which has not gone through a peer-review process. The method introduced by this paper involved processes of wastewater pasteurization (at 60 deg C for 1-1.5 hrs for virus inactivation), 0.2 um membrane filtration (40 mL filtrate is stored at 4 deg C for further analysis), filtrate centrifugation (precipitated viral particles collected and resuspended), RNA extraction, and then quantitative PCR (qPCR). The process is labor-intensive. For individual's home uses, it is just useful for each individual to know the binary data - presence or absence of virus. Quantitatively giving the copies of RNA segments is not that meaningful for each home, despite that it is indeed important to know the proprietary models (by BioBot Analytics Inc - the affiliation of the paper's authors) of mapping the copies of RNA segments from wastewater samples to the actual number of infected people coupled with confirmed clinical cases as validation data points on the larger scale at the Borough or the University. With that said, qualitative methods for COVID-19 testing in wastewater are highly desirable. If there are any P/A test kits available on the market, I will buy it. ...  Read more

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