We examine the spatial extrema (local maxima, minima and saddle points) of the covariant scalars (density, Hubble expansion, spatial curvature and eigenvalues of the shear and electric Weyl tensors) of the quasispherical Szekeres dust models. Sufficient conditions are obtained for the existence of distributions of multiple extrema in spatial comoving locations that can be prescribed through initial conditions. These distributions evolve without shell crossing singularities at least for ever expanding models (with or without cosmological constant) in the full evolution range where the models are valid. By considering the local maxima and minima of the density, our results allow for setting up elaborated networks of “pancake” shaped evolving cold dark matter overdensities and density voids whose spatial distribution and amplitudes can be controlled from initial data compatible with standard early Universe initial conditions. We believe that these results have an enormous range of potential application by providing a fully relativistic nonperturbative coarse grained modeling of cosmic structure at all scales.

We provide an extensive review of 17 independent and industry-funded studies targeting carbonyls in aerosol emissions of Heated Tobacco Products (HTPs), focusing on quality criteria based on the reproducibility of experiments, appropriate analytic methods, and puffing regimes. Most revised studies complied with these requirements, but some were unreproducible, while others failed to consider analytical variables that may have affected the results and/or produced unrealistic comparisons. We also provide a review of the literature on the physicochemical properties of heated tobacco and HTP aerosols, as well as the evaluation of HTPs by regulatory agencies, addressing various critiques of their relative safety profile. The outcomes from the revised studies and regulatory evaluations tend to agree with and converge to a general consensus that HTP aerosols expose users to significantly lower levels of toxicity than tobacco smoke.

The inhalation of metallic compounds in e-cigarette (EC) aerosol emissions presents legitimate concerns of potential harms for users. We provide a critical review of laboratory studies published after 2017 on metal contents in EC aerosol, focusing on the consistency between their experimental design, real life device usage and appropriate evaluation of exposure risks. All experiments reporting levels above toxicological markers for some metals (e.g., nickel, lead, copper, manganese) exhibited the following experimental flaws: (i) high powered sub-ohm tank devices tested by means of puffing protocols whose airflows and puff volumes are conceived and appropriate for low powered devices; this testing necessarily involves overheating conditions that favor the production of toxicants and generate aerosols that are likely repellent to human users; (ii) miscalculation of exposure levels from experimental outcomes; (iii) pods and tank devices acquired months and years before the experiments, so that corrosion effects cannot be ruled out; (iv) failure to disclose important information on the characteristics of pods and tank devices, on the experimental methodology and on the resulting outcomes, thus hindering the interpretation of results and the possibility of replication. In general, low powered devices tested without these shortcomings produced metal exposure levels well below strict reference toxicological markers. We believe this review provides useful guidelines for a more objective risk assessment of EC aerosol emissions and signals the necessity to upgrade current laboratory testing standards.

We study the differences and equivalences between the nonperturbative description of the evolution of cosmic structure furnished by the Szekeres dust models (a nonspherical exact solution of Einstein’s equations) and the dynamics of cosmological perturbation theory ($CPT$) for dust sources in a $\mathrm{\Lambda }\mathrm{CDM}$ background. We show how the dynamics of Szekeres models can be described by evolution equations given in terms of “exact fluctuations” that identically reduce (at all orders) to evolution equations of $CPT$ in the comoving isochronous gauge. We explicitly show how Szekeres linearized exact fluctuations are specific (deterministic) realizations of standard linear perturbations of $CPT$ given as random fields, but, as opposed to the latter perturbations, they can be evolved exactly into the full nonlinear regime. We prove two important results: (i) the conservation of the curvature perturbation (at all scales) also holds for the appropriate linear approximation of the exact Szekeres fluctuations in a $\mathrm{\Lambda }\mathrm{CDM}$ background, and (ii) the different collapse morphologies of Szekeres models yields, at nonlinear order, different functional forms for the growth factor that follows from the study of redshift space distortions. The metric-based potentials used in linear $CPT$ are computed in terms of the parameters of the linearized Szekeres models, thus allowing us to relate our results to linear $CPT$ results in other gauges. We believe that these results provide a solid starting stage to examine the role of non-perturbative general relativity in current cosmological research.