Off-topic, but this lab got $4.5M for equipment and still couldn't pay the students analyzing the data? What's up with that?
"Student volunteer" probably refers to undergrad students who are working on their theses.
Air Pollution in Our Homes
41–50 of 137 posts
Re: Air Pollution in Our Homes
#42If you're concerned about indoor pollution, I highly recommend house plants.
In NASA research[1], common house plants were found to remove toxic agents such as benzene and formaldehyde from the air.
Some of the best air purifying plants: Chlorophytum comosum (spider plant), Dracaena reflexa (song of India), Nephrolepis exaltata (Boston fern), Sansevieria trifasciata (snake plant), and Chamaedorea seifrizii (bamboo palm).
Re: Air Pollution in Our Homes
#43If you're concerned about indoor pollution, I highly recommend house plants. In NASA research[1], common house plants were found to remove toxic agents such as benzene and formaldehyde from the air. Some of the best air purifying plants: Chlorophytum comosum (spider plant), Dracaena reflexa (song of India), Nephrolepis exaltata (Boston fern), Sansevieria trifasciata (snake plant), and Chamaedorea seifrizii (bamboo pa…
Do these have any actual impact on health? Like, if I get a house plant, am I going to live a year longer? Two years longer?
That’s the whole problem with all this “health science.” It’s completely disconnected from expected outcomes that you can use to determine whether this is something even worth caring about.
EDIT re: sibling comment debunking impact of indoor plants. See, this is exactly what I mean. When you don’t tie observed correlations to concrete outcomes, all you do is confuse people. It’s not quite junk science, but it’s not helpful reporting of the science.
Re: Air Pollution in Our Homes
#44I am on the fence about research like this. On one hand, as an engineer by training it's hard for me to countenance the idea that any research (properly conducted) could be bad. On the other hand, people have been cooking indoors since time immemorial, and even things like toasters are more than a century old. If they were dangerous, we'd know by know. The risk is that such research gets oversold by the media into a…
People in some countries have been cooking with indoor wood-fired stoves forever, yet we know for sure that these stoves are bad for respiratory health. That doesn't mean all the research is wrong! I think the big take away is that you should pretty much always turn on the exhaust hood over your stove top when you cook. Doing so removes many of the particles generated by cooking.
But there is no connection to an actual outcome. Is this reducing my expected lifespan by a year? Two years? Or ten years? I might care about the latter, hard for me to get worked up about the former.
The fact that we’ve been doing this a long time means the effect couldn’t be all that large, or else we would’ve noticed something (e.g. a stark difference between those who cook at home and those who eat out).
Re: Air Pollution in Our Homes
#45If you're concerned about indoor pollution, I highly recommend house plants. In NASA research[1], common house plants were found to remove toxic agents such as benzene and formaldehyde from the air. Some of the best air purifying plants: Chlorophytum comosum (spider plant), Dracaena reflexa (song of India), Nephrolepis exaltata (Boston fern), Sansevieria trifasciata (snake plant), and Chamaedorea seifrizii (bamboo pa…
Do these have any actual impact on health? Like, if I get a house plant, am I going to live a year longer? Two years longer? That’s the whole problem with all this “health science.” It’s completely disconnected from expected outcomes that you can use to determine whether this is something even worth caring about. EDIT re: sibling comment debunking impact of indoor plants. See, this is exactly what I mean. When you do…
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Re: Air Pollution in Our Homes
#46If you're concerned about indoor pollution, I highly recommend house plants. In NASA research[1], common house plants were found to remove toxic agents such as benzene and formaldehyde from the air. Some of the best air purifying plants: Chlorophytum comosum (spider plant), Dracaena reflexa (song of India), Nephrolepis exaltata (Boston fern), Sansevieria trifasciata (snake plant), and Chamaedorea seifrizii (bamboo pa…
From https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/03/indoor-p...
Recently, Waring and his colleagues reanalyzed all 195 studies that have examined whether houseplants can filter the air. They found that some types of plants can remove higher amounts of VOCs than others. But once you factor in the effects of working in a large room, none of the plants are able to do much.
Waring told me to imagine a small office, 10 feet by 10 feet by eight feet. “You would have to put 1,000 plants in that office to have the same air-cleaning capacity of just changing over the air once per hour, which is the typical air-exchange rate in an office ventilation system,” he said. That’s 10 plants per square foot of floor space. Even if you chose the most effective type of VOC-filtering plant, you would still need one plant per square foot, Waring said.
Re: Air Pollution in Our Homes
#47If you're concerned about indoor pollution, I highly recommend house plants. In NASA research[1], common house plants were found to remove toxic agents such as benzene and formaldehyde from the air. Some of the best air purifying plants: Chlorophytum comosum (spider plant), Dracaena reflexa (song of India), Nephrolepis exaltata (Boston fern), Sansevieria trifasciata (snake plant), and Chamaedorea seifrizii (bamboo pa…
From https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/03/indoor-p... Recently, Waring and his colleagues reanalyzed all 195 studies that have examined whether houseplants can filter the air. They found that some types of plants can remove higher amounts of VOCs than others. But once you factor in the effects of working in a large room, none of the plants are able to do much. Waring told me to imagine a small office,…
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Re: Air Pollution in Our Homes
#48If you're concerned about indoor pollution, I highly recommend house plants. In NASA research[1], common house plants were found to remove toxic agents such as benzene and formaldehyde from the air. Some of the best air purifying plants: Chlorophytum comosum (spider plant), Dracaena reflexa (song of India), Nephrolepis exaltata (Boston fern), Sansevieria trifasciata (snake plant), and Chamaedorea seifrizii (bamboo pa…
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Re: Air Pollution in Our Homes
#49If you're concerned about indoor pollution, I highly recommend house plants. In NASA research[1], common house plants were found to remove toxic agents such as benzene and formaldehyde from the air. Some of the best air purifying plants: Chlorophytum comosum (spider plant), Dracaena reflexa (song of India), Nephrolepis exaltata (Boston fern), Sansevieria trifasciata (snake plant), and Chamaedorea seifrizii (bamboo pa…
From https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/03/indoor-p... Recently, Waring and his colleagues reanalyzed all 195 studies that have examined whether houseplants can filter the air. They found that some types of plants can remove higher amounts of VOCs than others. But once you factor in the effects of working in a large room, none of the plants are able to do much. Waring told me to imagine a small office,…
Wow, you beat me to posting this exact quote!
Re: Air Pollution in Our Homes
#50If you're concerned about indoor pollution, I highly recommend house plants. In NASA research[1], common house plants were found to remove toxic agents such as benzene and formaldehyde from the air. Some of the best air purifying plants: Chlorophytum comosum (spider plant), Dracaena reflexa (song of India), Nephrolepis exaltata (Boston fern), Sansevieria trifasciata (snake plant), and Chamaedorea seifrizii (bamboo pa…
From https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/03/indoor-p... Recently, Waring and his colleagues reanalyzed all 195 studies that have examined whether houseplants can filter the air. They found that some types of plants can remove higher amounts of VOCs than others. But once you factor in the effects of working in a large room, none of the plants are able to do much. Waring told me to imagine a small office,…
In many places new homes today include HRVs or similar ventilation systems which would likely do more than plants. I keep mine on 'intermittent' mode where it runs 15 minutes per hour all day.