In order to study the structure and temperature distribution within high-mass star-forming clumps, we employed the Australia Telescope Compact Array to image the $\mathrm{NH}_3$ (J,K) = (1,1) through (6,6) and the (2,1) inversion transitions, the $\mathrm{H}_2\mathrm{O}$ $6_{16}$-$5_{23}$ maser line at 22.23508 GHz, several $\mathrm{CH}_3\mathrm{OH}$ lines and hydrogen and helium recombination lines. In addition, 22- and 24-GHz radio continuum emission was also imaged.

The $\mathrm{NH}_3$ lines probe the optical depth and gas temperature of compact structures within the clumps. The $\mathrm{H}_2\mathrm{O}$ maser pinpoints the location of shocked gas associated with star formation. The recombination lines and the continuum emission trace the ionised gas associated with hot OB stars. The paper describes the data and presents sample images and spectra towards select clumps. The technique for estimating gas temperature from $\mathrm{NH}_3$ line ratios is described. The data show widespread hyperfine intensity anomalies in the $\mathrm{NH}_3$ (1,1) images, an indicator of non-LTE $\mathrm{NH}_3$ excitation. We also identify several new $\mathrm{NH}_3$ (3,3) masers associated with shocked gas. Towards AGAL328.809+00.632, the $\mathrm{H}_2\mathrm{O}$ $6_{16}$-$5_{23}$ line, normally seen as a maser, is instead seen as a thermally excited absorption feature against a strong background continuum. The data products are described in detail.

The reactions of simple conjugated dienes over divalent and trivalent transition metal-exchanged montmorillonites yield, in the absence of nucleophiles, a variety of products. Some of these products are a result of Diels-Alder cycloaddition reactions, whereas others are indicative of carbocation intermediates, i.e., other dimers, oligomers, and isomerization products of these intermediates. The reactions in sealed cells between 20° and 150°C show trends in the yields of the various product groups. Dimers of butadiene and isoprene formed by cycloaddition (i.e., 4-vinylcyclohexene and the monoterpene p-menthadiene (limonene)) were formed at low temperatures (20–50°C). As the temperature was raised, the total yield of dimers increased and higher oligomers were formed along with isomerization products of the dimers and oligomers. The products of cycloaddition, however, did not increase markedly. The type of solvent used for the reaction was found to influence the reactivity, e.g., the use of 1,4-dioxan rather than chloroform led to a reduction in total conversion and also to a markedly higher degree of selectivity. In the presence of a suitable nucleophile (methanol), both dienes gave the 1,4-addition product predominantly, which suggests that an allylic carbocation intermediate was involved. The use of an interlayer-supported nickel complex, [HNi(P(OEt)3)4]+, produced the only large scale polymerization observed in this work.

The synthesis of 10-Å hydrated kaolinite was accomplished by: (1) direct reaction of HF with a dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO)-kaolinite intercalate and water washing; (2) methanol washing of a DMSO-kaolinite intercalate followed by reaction with any alkali fluoride salt and water washing; and (3) room-temperature (RT) water-washing of a methanol-washed DMSO-kaolinite intercalate. In all syntheses the optimum yield required a kaolinite in which DMSO was bound strongly to the interlayer surface. In the first synthesis, water inclusion between clay layers appeared to be facilitated by the reduction of cohesive interlayer forces brought about by replacement of surface and edge OH− by F−. The fluorination reaction was accomplished either by direct reaction of HF or by HF produced through the hydrolysis of NH4F at 60°C. In the second synthesis, intercalated DMSO was replaced by methanol. F− solvated readily in methanol but not in DMSO. Consequently, F− produced through hydrolysis of the alkali fluoride salt entered the interlayer space and contributed to the fluorination reaction. Furthermore, the diffusion of methanol out of the interlayer space during the RT-washing step was slowed by F≈ solvation which aided the exchange of methanol for water. High yields of 10-Å kaolinite hydrate were obtained irrespective of choice of alkali fluoride salt. The third synthesis was dependent on matching the diffusion of methanol out of the interlayer space with diffusion of water into this space. At room temperature the diffusion rates were close enough to maintain the clay in the expanded state throughout the hydration process, and high yields of 10-Å kaolinite hydrate were obtained. At 60°C the diffusion rates were too dissimilar, and very low yields of hydrate were obtained.

Molecular dynamics computer simulations were used to study methanol molecules confined between the layers of 2:1 phyllosilicates. The model systems are based on natural Ca- and Na-rich montmorillonites. Data from the literature and determined by fitting the calculated layer spacing to experimental values were employed to obtain interactions between the charged 2:1 layers and the solvent molecules. The montmorillonite surface atoms were held rigid and the methyl group in the methanol molecule was represented by a soft Lennard-Jones sphere. Electrostatic interactions were determined by the Ewald sum method, whereas the van der Waals interactions were described by a Lennard-Jones potential. Comparison of our results with diffraction data indicates a good reproduction of the layer spacing. After the initial solvent layer forms, additional solvent layers form only after previous layers are complete. Each Ca2+ and Na+ ion in the monolayer has four and two methanol molecules, respectively, in the first solvation shell, whereas the solvation shell in the multilayer contains six and four methanol molecules, respectively. This agrees well with experimental data.

Kaolinite is often used as a base for the synthesis of new organo-mineral nanomaterials designed for applications in industry and in environmental protection. To make the mineral structure more likely to interact with organic molecules, a kaolinite-methanol complex (KM) can be used. In the present study, different experimental procedures were tested to investigate the formation of the KM. The kaolinitedimethyl sulfoxide intercalation compound (KDS), either wet or dried, was used as a pre-intercalate. The samples obtained were characterized using X-ray diffraction, Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy, CHNS elemental analysis, 13C CP-magic angle spinning nuclear magnetic resonance (MAS NMR), and 27Al and 29Si MAS NMR techniques. The method of density functional theory with dispersion corrections (DFT-D2) was used to explain the structure and to simulate the vibrational spectra of KM. Theoretical results were compared with experimental data. The most effective formation of the KM (d001 = 11.1 Å — wet; d001 = 8.7 Å — dried) was observed when the dried KDS precursor was used. In such conditions the degree of intercalation reached ~98% after 24 h of reaction time. As indicated by the CHNS elemental analysis, ~1/6 of the inner-surface OH groups were grafted by OCH3 groups. The esterification reaction was less efficient at higher temperatures or when wet KDS was used. In the latter case, the excess of very polar dimethyl sulfoxide molecules prevented intercalation of methanol and further grafting. Detailed analysis of the results of theoretical simulations revealed that the reaction of the KDS with methanol led to the formation of kaolinite with both grafted methoxy groups and intercalated methanol, and water molecules in the interlayer space. The spectra calculated revealed the contribution of individual vibrational modes into the complex bands, i.e. the energy of C-H vibrations was in the order: νasCHmet > νasCHmtx > νsCHmet > νsCHmtx.

We present the first results of simultaneous observations of the 6.035 GHz exited OH and 6.7 GHz methanol masers toward a sample of 10 high-mass young stellar objects (HMYSOs), observed using eMERLIN in 2020 and 2022. Searching for the coincidence and avoidance of these two maser transitions, we estimate physical conditions around central protostars. We identify Zeeman-splittings of the OH emission and determine the strength of the magnetic field. Combining it with linear polarization, we derive the magnetic field structure in these high-mass star-forming regions.

A 32-year-old male presented to the emergency department for confusion, dyspnea, and a “white out” of his central vision over the preceding 24 hours. The patient had recently consumed a bottle of alcohol purchased overseas. Bloodwork revealed a severe metabolic acidosis (pH 6.90) and a critically high methanol level of 28.9 mmol/l. Shortly after presentation, the patient went into respiratory failure and became comatose. He was intubated and admitted to the ICU.

Atranorin is a secondary metabolite found in many lichens. This compound can act as a photo-buffer, supporting its use as a marker of metabolic response to changes in light. In preliminary trials, atranorin was found to be unstable over time when in solution, potentially precluding its usefulness in this capacity. The present study tests the stability of atranorin in different extraction solvents and at different pH values over time using HPLC analysis. We found that atranorin is most stable in acetonitrile, among six tested solvents, and that the presence of strong acid or a strong base destabilizes the compound. We propose that atranorin breaks down through transesterification in methanol and ethanol until an equilibrium is reached, while a strong base breaks down atranorin through saponification and under acidic conditions, atranorin concentration significantly increases with time. Although atranorin levels were found to be stable in whole thallus extracts from fresh lichens using a leaching method, chemicals isolated using chromatographic separation showed similar breakdown to an atranorin standard. In future work on lichens atranorin should be extracted in acetonitrile or acetone without an added base or acid to yield the greatest stability and thus provide more accurate concentration values of atranorin with time using HPLC. The interactions of atranorin with acid and with chloroform need further study.

Introduction: Methanol intoxication is a well-recognized toxicological emergency. While most cases of significant methanol poisoning occur via ingestion, there are reports in the literature of poisoning resulting from the inhalational route. We report a series of methanol intoxications secondary to inhalational abuse of a methanol containing lacquer thinner presenting to an inner city Emergency Department. Methods: A laboratory database was searched for methanol levels > 5 mmol/L. (16mg/dL). from January 1, 2010 to December 31, 2015. A chart review was completed to determine mode of poisoning, clinical presentation, treatment, and disposition. Results: We found 35 patients who made a total of 83 emergency department (ED) visits with a methanol level > 5mmol/L. (16mg/dL). The methanol levels ranged from 5.3-39.6 mmol/L. (16.96 -126.72 mg/dL) . 73% of poisonings were secondary to inhalation of a methanol-containing lacquer thinner. The median age of these patients was 43 years, and 49% were male. The majority of patients (96%) resided in the core area. The most frequent chief complaints were substance abuse/intoxication, gastrointestinal complaints, and chest pain. 18% of patients described visual symptoms. Treatments were fomepizole only (59%), fomepizole plus hemodialysis (26%), and hemodialysis alone (2%). 49% of patients were discharged from the ED, while 28% and 23% were admitted to an intensive care unit (ICU) and an internal medicine ward respectively. There were no cases of blindness. We describe a cohort of patients who developed methanol poisoning from inhalation of a methanol containing lacquer thinner that required treatment with fomepizole and hemodialysis. While almost 1/3 of these patients were admitted to ICU, 49% were discharged from the emergency department after a course of fomepizole. The etiology of this outbreak was found to be a change in the formulation of the lacquer thinner, substituting a higher concentration of methanol for toluene. The manufacturer and a number of local retail outlets were contacted. This resulted in the product being taken off the shelves by the retail outlets, and eventually, a change in the product formulation by the manufacturer, with a resultant decrease in the methanol content. After these actions, we have not seen any additional presentations of inhalational methanol intoxication. Conclusion: We report the largest case series to date of patients who presented with methanol intoxication, requiring fomepizole and/or hemodialysis, secondary to inhalation of a methanol containing lacquer thinner. Physician advocacy regarding the etiology of this outbreak resulted in collaboration with retail outlets and subsequent action by the manufacturer. This ended the outbreak.

The first long-term maser (mainly methanol) monitoring program is under way with the radio telescopes of Ventspils International Radio Astronomy Center. The first activity of this program was to develop an observations methodology and data registration and reduction software for the Ventspils telescopes. The developed routines are to be used for maser variability monitoring, investigating short bursts of intensity and a search for new, previously unknown, maser sources. Currently the program consists of 41 methanol masers observed at 6.7 GHz, while new ones are periodically added. The maser sources are observed at 3 – 5 day intervals. It was found that most the sources display a significant level of variability with time, ranging from a few days, up to several months and, perhaps, years. In addition to non-varying masers, several types of maser variability behavior were observed, including: monotonic increases or decreases, un-periodical, quasi-periodic and periodic variations.

An efficient and robust method to measure vitamin D (25-hydroxy vitamin D3 (25(OH)D3) and 25-hydroxy vitamin D2 in dried blood spots (DBS) has been developed and applied in the pan-European multi-centre, internet-based, personalised nutrition intervention study Food4Me. The method includes calibration with blood containing endogenous 25(OH)D3, spotted as DBS and corrected for haematocrit content. The methodology was validated following international standards. The performance characteristics did not reach those of the current gold standard liquid chromatography-MS/MS in plasma for all parameters, but were found to be very suitable for status-level determination under field conditions. DBS sample quality was very high, and 3778 measurements of 25(OH)D3 were obtained from 1465 participants. The study centre and the season within the study centre were very good predictors of 25(OH)D3 levels (P<0·001 for each case). Seasonal effects were modelled by fitting a sine function with a minimum 25(OH)D3 level on 20 January and a maximum on 21 July. The seasonal amplitude varied from centre to centre. The largest difference between winter and summer levels was found in Germany and the smallest in Poland. The model was cross-validated to determine the consistency of the predictions and the performance of the DBS method. The Pearson’s correlation between the measured values and the predicted values was r 0·65, and the sd of their differences was 21·2 nmol/l. This includes the analytical variation and the biological variation within subjects. Overall, DBS obtained by unsupervised sampling of the participants at home was a viable methodology for obtaining vitamin D status information in a large nutritional study.

Since it was discovered in 2004, graphene has attracted enormous attention as an emerging material for future devices, but it has been found that conventional lithographic processes based on polymer resist degrade its intrinsic performance. Recently, our group studied a resist-free scanning tunneling microscopy-based lithography in various atmospheres by injecting volatile liquids into a chamber. In this study, multilayer graphene was scanned and etched by controlling bias voltage under methanol pressure. We focused on improving patterning results in terms of depth and line width, while the previous study was performed to find an optimum gas environment for patterning on a graphite surface. Specifically, we report patterning outputs depending on conditions of voltage, current, and pressure. The optimum conditions for methanol environment etching were a gas pressure in the range of 41–50 torr, a −4 V tip bias, and a 2 nA tunneling current.

The Australia Telescope Compact Array (ATCA) has been used to determine positions for many southern methanol maser sites, with accuracy better than 1 arcsec. The results are presented here as a catalogue of more than 350 distinct sites, some of them new discoveries, and many others with positional precision 10-times better than existing published values. Clusters of 2 or 3 sites are occasionally found to account for single previously listed sources. This in turn reveals that the velocity range for each individual site is sometimes smaller than that of the originally tabulated (blended) source. Only a handful of examples then remain with a velocity range of more than 16 km s−1 at a single compact (less than 2 arcsec) site. The precise methanol positions now allow apparent coincidences with OH masers to be confidently accepted or rejected; this has led to the important conclusion that, where a 1665-MHz OH maser lies in a massive star formation region, at more than 80 percent of the OH sites there is a precisely coincident methanol maser. The methanol precision achieved here will also allow clear comparisons with likely associated IR sources when the next generation of far-IR surveys produce precise positions.

Although the sperm cryopreservation of freshwater and marine teleosts has been feasible for years, the cryopreservation of some fish embryos still remains elusive. Thus, the objective of this experiment was to analyze the embryo morphology after freezing and thawing 40 embryos of Piaractus mesopotamicus immersed into methanol and ethylene glycol, both at 7, 10 and 13% plus 0.1 M sucrose for 10 min. Soon after thawing, three embryos were treated with historesin, stained with hematoxylin–eosin and analyzed under an optical microscope. From every treatment, one palette containing embryos was thawed and incubated, but none of the eggs hatched. Samples containing two embryos were immersed into 10% methanol or 10% ethylene glycol both in association with sucrose, and embryos immersed into only water or sucrose solution were frozen, processed and analyzed using scanning electron microscopy (SEM). In both cases, the control group was immersed into only water. Although the embryos had the chorion, vitello, yolk syncytial layer and blastoderm, all of them were found altered under the optical microscope and by SEM. The chorion was irregular and injured; there was no individuality in the yolk granules; the yolk syncytial layer had an irregular shape, thickness and size; the blastoderm showed injuries in the nucleus shape and sometimes was absent; the blastoderm was located in atypical areas and absent in some embryos. In conclusion, no treatment was effective in preserving the embryos, and none of the embryos avoided injury from intracellular ice formation. These morphological injuries during the freezing process made the P. mesopotamicus embryos unfeasible for hatching.

We present the outcomes of the consistent analysis of 6 epochs of VLBA 12.2 GHz data obtained between 1995 and 2005 towards the known high-mass star formation reigon NGC7538 IRS1 N. Our analysis concentrates on the study of the main spectral/spatial feature, which is 20 VLBA synthesized beams in size with a distinct velocity gradient. We looked for proper motion signals relative to the central peak which, in an edge-on disc framework, is expected to be stationary. We also study the peak flux and the spatial brightness profile of the main maser feature searching for maser variability. Our results are twofold: we detect a clear proper motion signal of three spatial features (0.21, 0.1, 0.65 mas yr−1) and conclude that these can be made consistent with previous modelling of a Keplerian disc seen edge-on around a high-mass protostar. We further detect a consistent decrease of the peak flux over the time-span 1995-2005 (~ 5.4 Jy yr−1), confirmed when taking into account earlier data (1986, 1987) as well as by the 6.7 GHz maser emission. Also, the width of the spatial brightness profile of the main feature seems to decrease between 1995 and 2005 by some 50%. We consider these observables as clear signs of partial maser saturation.

Methanol masers are known to be among the most reliable tracers of high-mass stars in early stages of evolution. A number of searches across the Galaxy has yielded to date, a complete census of those masers in two thirds of the Milky Way, providing a catalogue of some 800 sources to be studied in depth. In particular, it is important to characterise the physical properties of the objects hosting methanol masers, and this is possible today using data from the Herschel Space Observatory (HSO). The exceptional spatial resolution of HSO and its wavelength coverage are perfectly tuned to put the methanol maser phase into its star formation context. This paper presents results on the characterisation of methanol maser hosts using Herschel data from the Hi-GAL project, an Open Time Key Project to survey the inner Galactic plane at 5 wavelengths between 70 and 500 μm.