Exhaust gas

Jacob Roach / Digital Trends Candles? No. Potpourri? Not for me. Essential oils? They aren’t that essential. The only thing that can soothe my olfaction is the sweet smell of the Steam Deck vents. It’s the smell of burning plastic, the sweet and honey-like aroma of ozone, and the sense of dead brain cells. But now, here’s Valve saying I shouldn’t smell my Steam Deck vents. Steam support is saying to “please refrain from this behavior for the safety of your health.” That’s even after Steam support told Reddit user…

The rapidly rising number of space launches could pose a new threat to Earth’s critical ozone layer, according to a growing body of scientific research.Our ozone layer is often touted as a global environmental success story. Since the 1987 signing of the Montreal Protocol—an international treaty to protect the ozone—countries around the world have rallied to stop producing and emitting the chemical compounds that contributed to the dramatic thinning of the ozone layer above Antarctica. Despite a brief backslide in the…

This story was originally published by Grist, in collaboration with the Houston Chronicle and the Beaumont Enterprise. The project was supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism.The trouble began in the middle of the night. Around 2 a.m. on January 10, 2017, an air quality monitor in Port Arthur, Texas, began recording sulfur dioxide readings well above the federal standard of 75 parts per billion, or ppb. The monitor had recently been installed by regulators to keep an eye on Oxbow Calcining, a company owned by…

Photo: OLIVIER DOULIERY / AFP (Getty Images)This story was originally published by Grist. You can subscribe to its weekly newsletter here. Less than 1 percent of the nation’s roughly 500,000 school buses are electric or run on low-emission fuels. That’s about to change.Nearly 400 school districts across the United States, including in several Indigenous tribal lands, as well as in Puerto Rico and American Samoa, will receive around $1 billion to purchase new, mostly electric school buses as part of a Biden Administration…