Tens of thousands of unknown chemicals surrounds us.
Tens of thousands of unknown chemicals surrounds us. Most are harmless, but some are harmful to our health and the environment. Anneli Kruve at Stockholm University has received a five-year EU grant to develop an AI model that can quickly determine which chemicals in a sample are potentially toxic.
According to researchers' estimates, half a million different chemical substances may have leaked into the environment from food, cosmetics, clothes, pesticides, building materials and other things humanity has produced. When the substances end up in nature, they begin to break down and react with each other, which creates even more substances. Analyzes of water samples from water treatment plants show that out of thousands of different chemicals present, at least 90 percent are completely unknown.
"Most of them are natural and harmless, but the problem is that we don't know which ones are toxic. This means we don't know which substances to remove," says Anneli Kruve, a researcher at the Department of Materials and Environmental Chemistry, Stockholm University.
Read more at Stockholm University
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