No abstract

The Chinese spirit baijiu is currently the world’s bestselling spirit, with more than ten billion liters sold in 2018. This is a figure that puts its sales higher than whiskey, vodka, gin, and tequila combined. The multitude of baijiu varieties available in the market differ in several ways ranging from aging to the traditional artisanship involved in producing the final spirit to several other features, including the rarity of the bottle. A result of these differences is a wide distribution of prices for the various baijiu products. Consequently, a single bottle of baijiu can cost anywhere from a few dollars, up to thousands of US dollars. The price differences among the various baijiu spirits necessitate the existence of reliable scientific methods that can efficiently differentiate and authenticate the qualities of baijiu spirits. In addition, the existence of such methods facilitates the prevention of counterfeit sales of the final product. Considering this, we introduce an analytical chemistry method that distinguishes amongst different baijiu spirits based on fluorescence spectroscopy. Its attributes include the low cost and convenience that allows analysis either before or while the spirit is in the market. Our work herein focuses on the analysis of thirty different varieties of baijiu spirits from six different distilleries from East Asia and North America by fluorescence emission spectroscopy, which is associated to the price of the product. For the analysis, we employed a HORIBA FLUOROLOG 3 (HORIBA—Jobin Yvon) spectrometer. Major advantages of this method include the low cost, as no consumables except a quartz reusable cuvette are required, the minimal waste, and finally the quick processing of data.

Cigarette smoking is the most commonly used form of tobacco in the world. It is practiced by a large portion of the population, especially young people. These people often ignore or disregard the harmful toxic impacts that cigarettes have on both themselves and the environment. The United States Center for Disease Control estimates that nearly 40 million U.S. adults still smoke cigarettes, with nearly 1600 U.S. youth starting cigarette smoking every day. Although it is well-known that smoking cigarettes is addictive and leads to a numerous health conditions including cancer, chronic pulmonary and heart disease, the effect of disposing the cigarette debris in the environment is not very well investigated. It is well known that tobacco smoke contains more than 7000 chemical components of which 250 of the components are harmful to human health. Therefore, there is a need to monitor the toxic elements in these residues, as it relates to the impact of cigarette smoking to the health of the smokers and the public health impact of society. Considering that college students are more likely to be smokers this study targeted a college campus in Southwest Louisiana, USA that still allows smoking on campus. The campus site chosen was McNeese State University with the typical younger college student population. Sample collection was done by distributing cigarette butt sample collection buckets throughout the campus for three weeks in March of 2018. The samples collected were then microwave digested with trace metal grade nitric acid, filtered with 0.45 µm filter and analyzed by Inductively Coupled Plasma Optical Emission Spectroscopy (ICP-OES) for the following trace elements As, Cd, Cr, Cu, Mn, Ni, Pb and Zn.