Student Air Pollution, Water-Cleaning Swimsuit

Abstract

Late-night study sessions and long hours in the lab might cause some college students to neglect their personal hygiene. However, the engineering students who passed through a particular classroom in California can now point to evidence that they don’t forget to swipe on deodorant before heading out for the day. Their vindication comes from a recently published indoor air quality study conducted by Xiaochen Tang, Allen Goldstein, and colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley. The researchers wanted to measure the volatile organic chemicals (VOCs) emitted by students, so they chose a well-used classroom in the civil and environmental engineering department. It had no windows or exterior doors but was flushed with outside air five times per hour by the building’s ventilation system. Then, across the hall, they set up their big gun: a proton-transfer-reaction time-of-flight mass spectrometer, a sophisticated instrument used mainly for outdoor air quality measurements, and continually ...