## Special Issue on Advances in Environmental Applied Physics  
### [PERSON] (c)  
Dipartimento di Scienze Matematiche e Informatiche, Scienze Fisiche e Scienze della Terra, Universita degli Studi di Messina, [PERSON] 31, 98166 Messina, Italy; [EMAIL_ADDRESS]  
This Special Issue, \"Advances in Environmental Applied Physics\", is dedicated to collecting original papers from eminent researchers in the field of environmental pollutants, which constitute a health risk to the population, increasing the likelihood of incurring cancer. It is noteworthy that, among the various analytical techniques for the assessment of physical and chemical pollutants in the environment, alpha as well as gamma spectrometry are employed to obtain the specific activity of alpha and gamma radionuclides, respectively; ICP-MS can be used to investigate metal concentrations; liquid scintillation counting (LSC) is employed to quantify the activity concentration of tritium, radon, and gross alpha as well as beta; total alpha/beta counting, with the thick-source method, can be used for gross alpha- and beta-specific activity evaluation; and emanometry, in a H\({}_{2}\)O setup configuration, can be employed to estimate the gas radon activity concentration. Furthermore, the main topic of the article titled \"Evaluation of Radioactivity and Heavy Metals Content in a Basalt Aggregate for Concrete from Sicily, Southern Italy: A Case Study\" is an investigation on the natural and anthropic radioactivity of as well as heavy metals content in a basalt aggregate for concrete from Sicily, Southern Italy, performed as a case study. In particular, the evaluation of the specific activity of radium-226, thorium-232, potassium-40, and caesium-137 radionuclides was performed by using high-purity germanium (HPGe) \(\gamma\)-ray spectrometry, together with the estimation of several indices developed to evaluate the radiological risk for the population related to radiation exposure, i.e., the alpha index (I\({}_{\alpha}\)), the radium equivalent activity (Ra\({}_{\text{eq}}\)), the absorbed \(\gamma\)-dose rate (D), and the annual effective dose equivalent outdoors (AEDE\({}_{\text{out}}\)) as well as indoors (AEDE\({}_{\text{in}}\)). Moreover, measurements of the average heavy metals (arsenic, cadmium, copper, mercury, nickel, lead, antimony, thallium, and zinc) concentrations in the analyzed sample were performed by using inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS). Furthermore, with the aim to investigate any possible chemical pollution, the enrichment factor (EF), the geo-accumulation index (Igeo), the contamination factor (CF), and the pollution load index (PLI) were assessed. Finally, the identification of the source of the aforementioned radioisotopes of natural origin was carried out by X-ray diffraction (XRD), thus identifying the major mineralogical phases present in the investigated basalt aggregate for concrete [1, 2, 3]. The article titled \"Verification of Estimated Cosmic Neutron Intensities Using a Portable Neutron Monitoring System in Antarctica\" has the following featured application: a portable neutron-monitoring system that can be effectively applied to the verification of models used for estimating cosmic radiation intensities over a wide range of altitudes in a harsh environment, such as in Antarctica. Moreover, many ongoing studies for predicting the production rates of cosmogenic nuclides, forecasting changes in atmospheric compositions and climate, assessing the cosmic radiation exposure of aircraft crew and the effects on precise electronic devices, use numerical models that estimate cosmic radiation intensities in the atmosphere. Periodic verifications of these models are desirable to be performed for assuring the reliability of the study outcomes. Here, authors investigated an application of a portable neutron-monitoring system composed of an extended energy range neutron monitor and a small data logger for the monitoring of cosmic neutron intensities in a polar region.