The Trouble with Bromine: Health and Environmental Impacts of Organobromine Compounds
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The bromine atom was a definitive constituent of a number of industrial chemicals that were produced in very large quantities and performed useful functions in society until unexpected environmental impacts emerged and international actions were taken to curb their effects. Change was slow in coming because it took roughly half a century for awareness to bring about change. Ethylene dibromide was a fuel additive that removed lead deposits from internal combustion engines using the octane enhancer tetraethyl lead. However, while bromine protected the engine, it released the lead into the environment, damaging the health of urban populations. Methyl bromide was the preeminent agricultural fumigant and bromofluoro-compounds were leading fire suppressants until they were phased out under the Montreal Protocol to protect the ozone layer. Brominated flame retardants leaked out of plastic materials and migrated to cold regions, where they bioaccumulated along food chains and affected the development of birds and marine mammals. The worst offenders have now been banned under the Stockholm Convention. Industrial chemists have responded to these unexpected environmental impacts, which are examples of Rumsfeld's 'unknown unknowns', by creating safer but still effective alternatives. Continued environmental monitoring is needed to guard against more 'surprises'.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".