Arsenic and pre-1970s museum specimens: Using a hand-held XRF analyzer to determine the prevalence of arsenic at Naturalis Biodiversity Center
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The use of arsenic in the preservation of biological specimens was common practice prior to 1970. Because the Naturalis Center for Biodiversity (Naturalis) has extensive collections from before 1950, it was suspected that it held many contaminated specimens. In 2013, Naturalis tested 220 objects for the presence of arsenic over a period of 2 days using a handheld x-ray fluorescence analyzer, which detects arsenic, lead, mercury, and some other metals on objects. This testing provides an estimate of the prevalence of contaminated specimens, as well as a way to determine whether arsenic had spread into noncollection areas. In addition to specimens, floors, desks, keyboards, gloves, elevators, and lab coats were tested for arsenic presence and quantity. The results indicate that mounted specimens do not spread large amounts of arsenic onto the surrounding areas. However, there was sufficient contamination to warrant concern such that the arsenic-handling policy was modified to include different categories of contamination. From this framework, policy and physical changes to the building were made to minimize exposure by collections staff and visitors.
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.
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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 it