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The health benefits of better air

dynomight.net

311–320 of 471 posts

Re: The health benefits of better air

#312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe, if China would curtail their CFC usage perhaps. ...A recently reported slowdown in the decline of the atmospheric concentration of CFC-11 after 2012, however, suggests that global emissions have increased... We show that emissions from eastern mainland China are 7.0 ± 3.0 (±1 standard deviation) gigagrams per year higher in 2014–2017 than in 2008–2012, and that the increase in emissions arises primarily around…

That's from 2019, they have since reduced the leaks, this from 2021: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03277-w

Great news, thanks for the update.

Re: The health benefits of better air

#313

This article seems to make fantastic jumps from the believable -- mortality from overall air pollution (e.g. in Delhi) to the frankly unbelievable -- your ultrasonic humidifier supposedly reducing your life by nearly an hour each night, or that a daily commute between Newark and NYC takes half a year off your life. According to this logic, anyone who works in the subway should be dying, what, 10 years earlier? Which…

Oh I read their allegedly "humidifiers kill" snippet, so tl;dr: > but ultrasonic humidifiers produce huge numbers of particles. They turn any minerals in the water become airborne particles. got the following steady-state increases over background levels. > Mineral water: ~265 > Tap water (Seoul): ~260 > Purified water: ~50 > Distilled water: ~0 So what you mean is that if I follow the instructions on the manual and…

Get a TDS meter and measure PPM in your water. Reverse osmosis filtered water will do, just activated carbon filtered water will not.

Re: The health benefits of better air

#314
Skimming the comments (i.e., those missing the lede)...the arc of the article is this: breathing is another form of eating. It's how your body consumes additional resources and persists. You breathe all day. Every day.

One breath probably won't kill you. But take enough breaths of the wrong micro-substance and that aggregation will likely shorten your life. Perhaps significantly.

Conclusion: If watching your (food) diet is important so is you gases (i.e., air) diet.

Makes sense.

Re: The health benefits of better air

#315
post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Extinguish candles with a lid. If you are worrying about the method by which you extinguish a candle, worrying is what's going to shorten your life, not the candle.

I have a cheap pm10 meter and ran it continuously for a few weeks. Next too cooking meat the other activity that stood out was blowing out the birthday candles. The pm10 rose to 300 and only was backs to healthy levels (below 50) several hours later. I was as surprised as you are. Next time I'll definitely open a window

Where did you get a cheap meter and what do you consider cheap :D?

Re: The health benefits of better air

#316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a great resource, thank you. As a tinkerer who is already quite far down the ESP8266 rabbit hole, are you able to tell me if your software distribution has any particular "special sauce" around the interpretation of the data from these sensors? Or is it predominantly glue between the sensors and the OLED display / your cloud service? I am interested in replicating your hardware stack but implementing the softw…

There is no secret sauce needed. The Plantower sensors tell you the PM2.5 in micrograms directly and we just display it to the OLED display or send it to a server. It is all open source so you can check the code.

Thanks.

Re: The health benefits of better air

#318
post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm no way an expert on the matter but by pure logic it's still amazes me how we survived (and evolved!) as a species for thousand of years without almost no shelter from direct sunlight and yet now (too much) sunlight exposure is seen as a cause of death. I know we lost almost all the body hair we used to have but still, we usually wear clothes when under the sun.

Skin cancer probably plays no role for your ability to reproduce. By the time you die from skin cancer you already had children and probably even grandchildren.

The longer you live as a male the more children you can have. Also grandparents helping raise grandkids is a factor in their survival in the village ..

Re: The health benefits of better air

#319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> anyone who works in the subway should be dying, what, 10 years earlier? From my ad-hoc survey of subway driver friends, this seems about true... Most die in their late 60's in a country where most people make it to 70/80. Obviously the fact their job involves sitting in a chair all day doesn't help things...

Is there a fundamental reason why the subway must be like that? I assume it's not as bad in say Hong Kong? Copenhagen metro for example is automated and there's a wall and automatic doors separating the tracks from the platform. I assume it's quite clean.

Subways are dusty because they use mechanical brakes that produce metal dust particles.

For $50 per carriage, dust collecting sponges, fans or filters could be fitted, but train companies don't care. By doing anything about the dust they might be opening themselves up to lawsuits claiming they didn't do enough about a risk they knew about... There are also political issues - often the train company bought the trains 50 years ago and will pay extortionate prices to the original manufacturer for any modifications, and if they make modifications themselves the manufacturer will drop all support.

Many modern trains are starting to have electric braking, and that produces far less dust.

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