Potential Increased Risk of Trisomy 18 Observed After a Fertilizer Warehouse Fire in Brazos County and TX

Background: In this paper, we aimed to investigate the potential impacts of a fire accident in a fertilizer warehouse on chromosomal anomalies, including Trisomy 21 (T21) and Trisomy (T18) among pregnancies in Brazos County, Texas. We conducted an observational study in Brazos County, TX, with all patients of T18 and T21 cases in the live births in Brazos County between 2005–2014. The prevalence of T18 and T21 before, during, and after the accident in Brazos County were calculated and compared. The Standardized Morbidity Ratio (SMR) was applied to compare the prevalence of T18 and T21 in Brazos County to the statewide prevalence in Texas after adjusting for maternal race and age. Compared with statewide risk, the risk of T18 during the impacted years in Brazos county was found to be significantly higher (SMR = 5.0, 95% Confidence Interval(CI): 2.19–9.89), while there was no significant difference before (SMR = 0.77, 0.13–2.54) and after the accident (SMR = 0.71, 0.12–2.36). However, the prevalence of T21 during the impacted years was not significantly different from those before or after the accident. This study conclusively suggests that this fertilizer fire may be related to the increased prevalence of T18 in Brazos County, though the findings warrant further investigation.

Solvent Form

Solvent form examines the destruction of art—through objects that have been destroyed (lost in fires, floods, vandalism, or similarly those artists that actively court or represent this destruction, such as Gustav Metzger), but also as a process within art that the object courts through form. In this manner, Solvent form looks to events such as the Momart warehouse fire in 2004 as well as the actions of art thief Stéphane Breitwieser in which the stolen work was destroyed. Against this overlay, a tendency is mapped whereby individuals attempt to conceptually gather these destroyed or lost objects, to somehow recoup in their absence. From this vantage, Solvent form—hinging on the dual meaning in the words solvent and solvency—proposes an idea of art as an attempt to secure and fix, which correspondingly undoes and destroys through its inception. It also weaves a narrative of art that intermingles with Jean Baudrillard’s ideas on disappearance, Georges Bataille and Paul Virilio’s negative or reverse miracle, Jean-Luc Nancy’s concept of the image (or imago as votive that keeps present the past, yet also burns), and Giorgio Agamben’s notion of art as an attempt to make the moment appear permeable. Likewise, it is through these destructions that one might distinguish a solvency within art and catch an operation in which something is made visible through these moments of destruction when art’s metaphorical undoing emerges as oddly literal.

The thing that is not a thing

Chapter four introduces the example of the Momart warehouse fire, in which large amounts of art—including high profile Young British Art—was destroyed when a thief apparently broke into an adjoining space and set the complex on fire. Works such as Tracey Emin’s Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995 (lost in the fire) are examined, as well as accounts of the public backlash and media attention surrounding this event. In addition, the implications of Jake and Dinos Chapman’s exact remake of Emin's piece as The Same Only Better are considered, along with the event's legacy and the expectation that these works of art will endure.

Analysis of a warehouse fire smoke plume over Paris with an N₂ Raman lidar and an optical thickness matching algorithm

A smoke plume, coming from an accidental fire in a textile warehouse in the north of Paris, covered a significant part of the Paris area on 17 April 2015 and seriously impacted the visibility over the megalopolis. This exceptional event was sampled with an automatic N2 Raman lidar, which operated 15 km south of Paris. The industrial pollution episode was concomitant with the long-range transport of dust aerosols originated from the Sahara, and with the presence of an extended stratus cloud cover. The analysis of the ground-based lidar profiles therefore required the development of an original inversion algorithm, using a top-down aerosol optical thickness matching (TDAM) approach. This study is, to the best of our knowledge, the first lidar measurement of a fresh smoke plume, emitted only a few hours after an accidental warehouse fire. Vertical profiles of the aerosol extinction coefficient, depolarization ratio, and lidar ratio are derived to optically characterize the aerosols that form the plume. We found a lidar ratio close to 50±10 sr for this fire smoke aerosol layer. The particle depolarization ratio is low, ∼1±0.1 %, suggesting the presence of either small particles or spherical hydrated aerosols in that layer. A Monte Carlo algorithm was used to assess the uncertainties on the optical parameters and to evaluate the TDAM algorithm.