Needs to wait until the sun beam goes away.

Over the past decade, vaping has become a popular alternative to smoking, with many teenagers picking it up. The thought being that vaping is less harmful, if harmful at all.

The question is, are they?

What happens when you vape?

In my latest explainer video I dive into this.

If you have any questions, please let me know.

How Air Pollution Causes Heart Attacks and Strokes YouTube video by Al Haddrell

If you find this subject interesting, you may find my video on how particulate air pollution affects human health interesting as well. In many ways, the mechnism of harm caused by smoking is similar to that of cigarette smoking.
youtu.be/idddJ-JsV_o

Smoking vs. Vaping YouTube video by Al Haddrell

Here's a link to the video:
youtu.be/VDFgySf-pBc

Over the past decade, vaping has become a popular alternative to smoking, with many teenagers picking it up. The thought being that vaping is less harmful, if harmful at all.

The question is, are they?

What happens when you vape?

In my latest explainer video I dive into this.

Unfortunately not this year. I’ll add it to my calendar for 2027.

These are the accounts that Elon promotes over on X. This is why the discourse on that app has gone down the tubes, he’s turned the place into the Mos Eisley Cantina.

The overall aim of the this work is to develop cost effective mitigation strategies that can be employed in the unique environment of a farm setting to limit the damage to farming (and humans) by bird flu.

This is a 3 year grant that will utilise next generation technologies developed at the two institutions (@umich.edu and @bristoluni.bsky.social) to study airborne viruses.

This project is funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Study explores airborne bird flu decay in livestock environments Discovering how the bird flu virus degrades in the air around livestock and how engineering solutions can effect that degradation quickly and efficiently are core aims of a new University of Michigan ...

Airborne disease transmission doesn't just affect human populations. In collaboration with Herek Clack at the University of Michigan, my team has been funded $2M to study mechanisms of bird flu decay in the air, and to explore novel mitigation strategies.
www.news-medical.net/news/2026032...

That’s our team’s work. Given the circumstances, we’re going to try to get our paper out sooner than later.

Depends on the microbe. SARS-CoV-2 and E. coli, no, influenza, yes.

Anyway, those are some my thoughts on our latest publication. If you have any questions, let me know.

The approach taken in this study demonstrates that we have the technological capabilities in Bristol to further explore the complex chemistry occuring on thesurface of a droplet. This opens the possibility to identify the key chemical processes that are driving microbe inactivity

This study, along with others in the field, make it clear that the chemistry at the aerosol surface is different/unique.

We have shown in previous work that some microbes are highly sensitive to the surface of an aerosol.

There’s a lot more in this study, but I just wanted to highlight a few of the interesting findings. Long term, this work shows a few things that I think are important for understanding airborne disease transmission.

We also showed that the reaction was reversable. Simply by changing the humidity that the levitated droplet was experiencing, the reaction was able to be moved forwards and backwards.

Beyond the simple enhancement of the reaction rate, we also observed that the relative humidity of the system affected the ratio of the products formed.

This kind of specificity is both interesting and useful.

We used 3 different techniques to quantify the reaction: aerosol mass spectrometry (built by the Bzdekgroup at Bristol), off-line NMR and aerosol optical tweezers (developed by Jonathan Reid at Bristol).

In our study, the chemical reaction we looked at was simple esterification, where an alcohol reacts with a carboxylic acid.

If you were to then aerosolize the sample into trillions of tiny aerosol with a radius of 5 microns, the same starting volume would have a much higher surface to volume ratio.

This dramatic increase in the surface to volume ratio significantly increases the quantity of products.

If you were to divide the sample into two levitating balls of fluid, the surface to volume ratio would continue to increase.

Let’s say you could levitate the entire sample in a giant droplet. The absence of a container would further lead to an increase in the surface to volume ratio.

If you were to put the same volume of sample into 2 cups, you would double the amount of surface, and consequently the S/V. In doing so, you would double the total rate that the products of the reactions are produced.

This has obvious commercial implications.

Consider you have a solution in cup. If the solution reacts with the gas phase, then the rate of the reaction will be highly dependent on the surface to volume ratio, or S/V. The higher the S/V, the faster the reaction will occur between the chemicals on the surface and gas phase

Context: The chemistry at the air-liquid interface of a sample will be different than in the bulk. There are many reasons for this, such as the molecular orientation, higher solute concentration (due to evaporation of the solvent at the surface) and unusual acidity/basicity.

This work has implications from material fabrication through to understanding disease transmission.

The project was headed by Bryan Bzdek (University of Bristol, whose office is 3 doors down from mine).

Here’s a link to the article:
t.co/5JjUybRgVd

Aerosols are very small, have a high surface to volume ratio and can readily reach super saturation. This combination makes them a unique environment for chemical reactions. We had a paper published in JACS that looked into the rate of chemical reactions within and on aerosols.

It will depend on the microbe. SARS-CoV-2 is highly alkaline sensitive, so acidic vapour will stabilise it in the air. Influenza can handle very high alkalinity, so acidic vapour will have a minor effect. To know for sure, we need to measure it. I would advocate to minimise pollutants.