The nature and distribution of road sediment contaminants in the greater Las Vegas, Nevada area
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Road sediment is an underutilized medium in the investigation of environmental pollution, yet it serves as both a source and sink for a wide array of pollutants. In urban areas especially, contaminants present within road sediment have the potential to pose human health risks depending on the abundance, chemical, and physical nature of these contaminants as well as the duration (i.e. acute or chronic) of exposure. Las Vegas, Nevada is currently one of the fastest growing urban areas in the United States and is therefore a prime location for the investigation of potential environmental contaminants and pollutants in road sediment. Forty-six road sediment samples were collected from locations throughout the Las Vegas region, including Las Vegas, Henderson, and Boulder City. Geochemical and mineralogical characterization of the selected samples was completed using scanning electron microscopy (SEM), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), and X-ray fluorescence spectrometry (XRF). Results from these analyses indicate the presence of metal-bearing particulate matter (including metal shavings), in addition to spherules, all of which are consistent with an anthropogenic origin. Additionally, geoaccumulation index ( I geo ) values determined from XRF bulk chemical data show that Cu and Zn were enriched in road sediment samples ( I geo > 1) throughout Las Vegas and are thus considered to be significant anthropogenic pollutants in the region. This study serves as the first investigation into road sediment contaminants in the region, and provides a critical framework for more detailed investigation of the source and potential human health effects of these contaminants.
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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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".