Home Sweet Home: A Study of the ‘Chemical Soup’ in our Houses

Microbial traces of everything from coffee to antidepressants make up the invisible environment in our indoor spaces

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How Indoor Air Quality Became the New Wellness Fixation

It’s not just COVID: There’s a growing awareness that poor air quality is behind all sorts of maladies.

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Sweat, bleach and gym air quality: Chemical reactions make new airborne chemicals

One sweaty, huffing, exercising person emits as many chemicals from their body as up to five sedentary people, according to a new study. And notably, those human emissions, including amino acids from sweat or acetone from breath, chemically combine with bleach cleaners to form new airborne chemicals with unknown impacts to indoor air quality.

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Chemist researching impacts of poor indoor air quality

‘We spend more than 90 per cent of our time indoors,’ says U of S chemist Tara Kahan

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Clearing the air

Another technology that is assisting in the quest to protect populations from harmful air pollutants is low-cost sensors. These can’t do anything about the concentrations of pollutants in the air, of course, but they do enable us to know (approximately) what is there and take measures to protect our health if necessary.

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Coronavirus Lockdowns May Raise Exposure to Indoor Air Pollution

This spring, as the COVID-19 pandemic led people to hunker down at home, outdoor air quality improved dramatically in many cities and countries. In the northeastern U.S., for instance, air pollution dropped by 30 percent. But the lockdowns might be having the opposite effect indoors. 

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Every Breath You Take: An Indoor Smog Story

Thanks to federal regulations, our outdoor air has half the emissions from harmful gases that it had four decades ago.

Sounds great, right? Except Americans spend around 90 percent of their lives indoors, according to an EPA-funded study.

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Scientists reveal whole new world of chemistry by stepping indoors

An atmospheric chemist had spent her entire career probing the complexities of outdoor air — how gases and particles in the atmosphere move, interact and change, and how human activities perturb the air we breathe. Then, she went inside. It turns out the chemistry inside can be vastly more complex than that of outdoor air systems.

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How to Clear the Air, Literally, in Your Home

In the era of coronavirus and social distancing, we’re all cooped up in our homes, battling anxieties about the invisible dangers in the air. Might as well do something about it, as least as far as the air in your place is concerned.

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