Our homes are our sanctuaries—a fact that became clear to a lot of people this past year when they suddenly had to spend all their time there. But your indoor air might be dirtier than you think, and that could be making it uncomfortable at home, and potentially even make you sick.
There are a few things you can do to help and devices you can buy, like an air purifier, a dehumidifier, and a humidifier. But they aren’t cheap, so you don’t need to spend the money on anything if you aren’t already struggling with your indoor air quality. These are potential tools, not necessities. While their names are self-explanatory, it’s not as easy to figure out when each one is actually needed in your home. We talked to experts, read research reports, and tested some products. Below is what we found, and what we advise.
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You’ll be seeing more air purifiers in schools and offices as the world deals with the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. Read on to see which devices make sense for your home. Photograph: Getty Images
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Five World War II bombers took off from a Florida airfield on Oct. 5, 1967, to bomb the American South. An article that ran that morning in the Sarasota Herald-Tribune said that three B-17s and two PV-2s laden with 10,000 pounds of death-dealing cargo each would carry out their missions “with the City of Sarasota and eastern Manatee as their targets.”
While the bombers were certainly at war, they weren’t dropping explosives. Their enemy was a millimeters-long, brownish-red insect known to scientists as Solenopsis invicta, meaning “invincible ant,” and to lay people as the fire ant, aka “ants from hell” and “them devils.” The bombers were to unload mirex, a poison usually applied to grits, onto the critter.
By the late 1960s, the fire ant had been in the American South for more than 30 years. Southerners spoke of ruined crops, destroyed wildlife, and the ants’ fiery sting. How much damage the ants had actually caused was uncertain, but it was enough for the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to declare war on the pest. During an 11-year campaign, more than 143 million pounds of mirex were dropped across 77,220 square miles of land from Texas to Florida, costing close to $200 million. The outcome? The ants nearly doubled their range. The mirex, which was later found to be a carcinogen, persisted in the environment for decades, accumulating in birds’ eggs, mammals’ milk, and human tissues. The world’s leading ant researcher, E.O. Wilson, dubbed the mirex program the “Vietnam of entomology.”
As the pandemic has raged, we have been told to sequester ourselves to stay well and safeguard others. For many of us, that has meant living a more housebound life than normal.
We have developed an intimate familiarity with the textures of our couch. We have grown deeply attached to the softest items in our wardrobe. We have pounded vitamin D supplements to compensate for our vampiric relationship to the sun.
Now as we slowly emerge from our collective hibernation, it’s unsurprising that many of our bodies have changed.
But where we might see new curves, the $70 billion-a-year American weight-loss industry sees only profit. And so the dieting hustlers and charlatans have been pelting us with offers of products and routines that promise to strip us of the “quarantine 15” (while stripping us of our cash).
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Don’t let the weight-loss industry shame you into thinking “back to normal” means a return to calorie counting and appetite suppressant lollipops.
Steak knives, scissors, writing desks, and power tools: If you bring any of these things up around someone and they cringe, they either have a bizarre story to tell or they’re just left-handed, and, like 15 percent of the population, live in a world that’s not designed for them.
But handedness goes deeper than how you like to hold a pen. A dive into the genetics of handedness reveals that southpaws have quite a few other things in common, as well. But before that, it’s important to understand where handedness comes from.
Where Does Handedness Come From?
It used to be thought that lefties came to be as a result of a mother being stressed during pregnancy, but a more scientifically valid explanation has traced handedness to specific genes. Geneticists debated for years over whether the genes responsible for handedness were spread throughout our DNA or whether it was just one gene; there seemed to be no clear pattern.
Your desk is made up of individual, distinct atoms, but from far away its surface appears smooth. This simple idea is at the core of all our models of the physical world. We can describe what’s happening overall without getting bogged down in the complicated interactions between every atom and electron.
So when a new theoretical state of matter was discovered whose microscopic features stubbornly persist at all scales, many physicists refused to believe in its existence.
“When I first heard about fractons, I said there’s no way this could be true because it completely defies my prejudice of how systems behave,” said Nathan Seiberg, a theoretical physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. “But I was wrong. I realized I had been living in denial.”
The theoretical possibility of fractons surprised physicists in 2011. Recently, these strange states of matter have been leading physicists toward new theoretical frameworks that could help them tackle some of the grittiest problems in fundamental physics.
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This simulation shows how a fracton-filled material would be expected to scatter a beam of neutrons. H. Yan et al., Physical Review Letters
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
You’ll be seeing more air purifiers in schools and offices as the world deals with the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. Read on to see which devices make sense for your home. Photograph: Getty Images
This simulation shows how a fracton-filled material would be expected to scatter a beam of neutrons. H. Yan et al., Physical Review Letters
James' World 2 