The air around us might not be as clean as it appears

Air pollution is discussed a great deal by the media and as a general rule, we’re against it. Strangely, even though it’s so widely heard of and understood, it’s slightly surprising to think of it actually affecting us. We think of it as damaging the Ozone layer or our eco systems but making the direct connection to the air we breathe and things like traffic or factories is oddly strange. It should be obvious to us but it’s just one of those things which we don’t think about, I suppose it’d be madness to constantly worry about everything that could be doing us harm and as such, we tend to turn a bit of a blind eye to this sort of thing.

Scientists in the USA have developed a sensor and app that would let us monitor the air quality around us, meaning we’d know just how dangerous any chemicals in the air could be to our wellness in general. This is good news is you’re a commuter and you spend a lot of time near or on the roads without the protection of your own automobile but it could cause a fair amount of issues too.

Being able to monitor the air around us would give us the luxury of picking a route to work which was perhaps less damaging to our lungs. It’d also open us up to all kinds of new hysteria as people saw first-hand just how polluted the area around them might be. Pollution doesn’t disperse nearly as quickly as you might have thought it did, it hangs in the air for quite a while and in high population areas like city the air quality can be quite low.

It’ll be a little while before we see things like this go into mass production  but I’ve no doubt that they will, it’ll certainly be interesting to see what happens. Do you think we’ll see hysteria or simply more people on the bus?