『Air Quality Matters』のカバーアート

Air Quality Matters

Air Quality Matters

著者: Simon Jones
無料で聴く

Air Quality Matters inside our buildings and out.

This Podcast is about Indoor Air Quality, Outdoor Air Quality, Ventilation, and Health in our homes, workplaces, and education settings.

And we already have many of the tools we need to make a difference.

The conversations we have and how we share this knowledge is the key to our success.

We speak with the leaders at the heart of this sector about them and their work, innovation and where this is all going.

Air quality is the single most significant environmental risk we face to our health and wellbeing, and its impacts on us, our friends, our families, and society are profound.

From housing to the workplace, education to healthcare, the quality of the air we breathe matters.

Air Quality Matters


© 2025 Air Quality Matters
博物学 科学 自然・生態学
エピソード
  • Is Peer Review Built on Sand? Why the 'Gold Standard' May Be Failing Air Quality Science
    2026/08/10
    This week, I step back from the interviews to share a personal reflection on a question that has been nagging at me for some time, sparked by recent encounters with dubious manufacturer claims, the fallout from a prominent Cambridge professor scandal, and my own complicity in wielding peer review as a weapon against innovation: What if the single biggest barrier to progress in air quality and the built environment isn't a lack of good ideas or new technology—but our complete failure to recognise that the gold standard we use to validate truth, peer review itself, is fundamentally broken and built on sand? Key Topics Discussed: The Ideal Versus the Reality: In theory, peer review is the guardian of rigorous science. Experts with time and resources deeply interrogate methodology, check references, and provide robust feedback. Papers that genuinely move the field forward are accepted. But the mechanical reality of 2026 is very different. Manuscript submissions have exponentially outpaced the pool of available reviewers. Academics are trapped in a publish or perish hamster wheel. Peer review is unpaid, unrecognised, and unrewarded. Studies suggest just 10% of reviewers handle almost 50% of the global peer review workload. When you have a small pool of incredibly time poor reviewers who are fundamentally overwhelmed, corners get cut. The Business Model Problem: Over the last decade, there has been a massive shift towards open access and article processing charges. Publishers now make money based on volume, not subscription exclusivity. When authors or institutions pay upwards of two to four thousand pounds to publish a single paper, the publisher is financially incentivised to publish more, not publish better. This environment has given rise to paper mills, highly sophisticated profit driven organisations that manufacture fake or desperately low quality research and sell authorships to desperate academics who need to meet publication quotas. The AI Closed Loop: Paper mills are using generative AI at industrial scale to produce convincing fake papers that slip past exhausted human reviewers. In response to burnout, an increasing number of time poor scholars are using AI to read papers and write their peer reviews. We are rapidly approaching a closed loop where an AI writes a substandard paper to meet a human's academic quota, submits it to a profit driven journal, and another AI reviews and accepts it on behalf of a burned out human reviewer. The fundamental human element, the actual peer in peer review, is being automated out of existence. The Consequences for Our Field: In air quality, health and the built environment, bad data passing as peer reviewed science or misleading claims backed up by pseudoscientific marketing has real world consequences. It leads to bad public policy, misallocation of millions of pounds of funding, inadequate ventilation standards, poor building performance and ultimately public harm. We cannot afford a foundation built on sand. We need to rethink the metrics of academic success, recognise peer review as core scholarly labour that needs compensation, and create alternative pathways for validating independent innovation. If we know the traditional peer review monopoly is struggling, we cannot lazily dismiss independent lab data simply because it doesn't carry a specific journal's logo. The Air Quality Matters Podcast in Partnership with Particles Plus https://particlesplus.com/ Eurovent (https://www.eurovent.eu/) - Aico (https://www.aico.co.uk/) - Lindab (https://www.lindab.ie/) - S&P UK (https://www.solerpalau.com/en-uk/) The One Take Podcast in Partnership with SafeTraces (https://www.safetraces.com/) - Inbiot (https://www.inbiot.es/?utm_campaign=simon&utm_source=airqualitymatters&utm_medium=podcast) - Farmwood (https://farmwood.co.uk/) - iE Electronics (https://www.eielectronics.ie/) and iAir Group (https://iair-group.com/) Zehnder https://www.zehndergroup.com/en Do check them out in the links and on the Air Quality Matters Website. (https://www.airqualitymatters.net/podcast) If you haven't checked out the YouTube channel its here (https://www.youtube.com/@airqualitymatters-SimonJones). Do subscribe if you can, lots more content is coming soon.
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    19 分
  • Smart Cars, Cleaner Streets: How Hybrid Vehicles Could Read and React to Pollution Hotspots
    2026/08/07
    This week, we dive into a comprehensive review published in the Science of the Total Environment titled Integration of Air Quality Monitoring Systems with Hybrid Electric Vehicles for Emissions Control in Smart Cities, to explore a question that fundamentally challenges how we think about urban air pollution: What if the single biggest opportunity to tackle air quality in our cities isn't just making vehicles cleaner—but transforming them into intelligent, mobile monitoring networks that actively adapt their behavior based on real-time pollution data Key Topics Discussed: Adaptive Green Zones: Currently, hybrid cars are incredibly smart internally. They switch between internal combustion engine and battery based on efficiency, charge levels, and acceleration. But they are completely blind to environmental conditions outside the windshield. Imagine integrating a miniaturised air quality monitoring system into the car using IoT sensors and vehicle to everything communication. If a smart vehicle drives into a heavily polluted urban zone, say outside a school at drop off time or a congested city centre, the onboard AI reads the local air quality data and automatically forces the car to switch entirely to battery power. It shuts off the combustion engine. It stops contributing to the local pollution hotspot instantly. AI Driven Eco Routing: By linking up with smart city infrastructure and using machine learning, these vehicles can use AI driven eco routing. Your GPS wouldn't just find the faster route. It could find a route that minimises your exposure to highly polluted areas, spreading the traffic load and protecting the occupants inside the cabin. It turns the vehicle from a passive polluter into an active dynamic participant in urban air quality management. The Technical Hurdles: It's not as simple as strapping a sensor to a bumper. We need incredibly robust, low cost sensors that don't lose their calibration every time a car goes over a pothole or experiences a shift in humidity. There's a massive communication challenge. Do we use 5G or DSRC? The latency has to be milliseconds for cars to communicate effectively. And then there's data privacy. Tracking a car's location, speed, and the air it's driven through raises questions. We need standardised, highly secure cryptographic protocols so that data can be shared with city infrastructure without compromising driver privacy. The Future of Urban Air Quality Management: This is the frontier. The future of clean air isn't just about sticking static expensive reference sensors on a few lampposts around the city. It's about leveraging the millions of vehicles already on the road, turning them into dynamic moving networks of data that physically alter how our cities operate in real time. It's a huge technical challenge, but the payoff for urban health could be transformative. A comprehensive review on the integration of air quality monitoring systems with hybrid electric vehicles for emission control in smart cities https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2025.180022 The Air Quality Matters Podcast in Partnership with Particles Plus https://particlesplus.com/ Eurovent (https://www.eurovent.eu/) - Aico (https://www.aico.co.uk/) - Lindab (https://www.lindab.ie/) - S&P UK (https://www.solerpalau.com/en-uk/) The One Take Podcast in Partnership with SafeTraces (https://www.safetraces.com/) - Inbiot (https://www.inbiot.es/?utm_campaign=simon&utm_source=airqualitymatters&utm_medium=podcast) - Farmwood (https://farmwood.co.uk/) - iE Electronics (https://www.eielectronics.ie/) and iAir Group (https://iair-group.com/) Zehnder https://www.zehndergroup.com/en Do check them out in the links and on the Air Quality Matters Website. (https://www.airqualitymatters.net/podcast) If you haven't checked out the YouTube channel its here (https://www.youtube.com/@airqualitymatters-SimonJones). Do subscribe if you can, lots more content is coming soon.
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    5 分
  • When Windows Become Hazards: How Heat Waves and Ozone Are Changing Indoor Air - #OT53
    2026/07/30
    This week, we dive into a modelling study published in Environmental Science, Processes and Impacts titled Long-Term Prediction of Climate Change Impacts on Indoor Particulate Pollution, a case study of residential buildings, to explore a question that fundamentally challenges how we think about natural ventilation and climate adaptation: What if the single biggest barrier to maintaining healthy indoor air quality in the coming decades isn't just outdoor pollution—but our complete failure to recognise that rising temperatures are transforming our homes into chemical reactors that generate dangerous ultrafine particles right where we breathe? Key Topics Discussed: The Chemistry Problem: Initially, there is some good news. Because of tightening air pollution legislation globally, the baseline outdoor particulate matter, things like PM2.5 and PM10 from traffic and industry, is actually projected to decrease in Europe over the next century. But the chemistry of our indoor spaces is changing. As outdoor temperatures rise, outdoor ozone levels also rise. And as our homes get warmer, the emission rate of volatile organic compounds or VOCs from indoor furnishings increase. When ozone and limonene meet in your living room, they react, and they produce something called secondary organic aerosols, or SOAs, including particulate matter and things like formaldehyde. So while the overall mass of large particles coming in from traffic might drop, the chemistry happening right inside our homes is going to create a whole new soup of ultrafine particles. Extreme Weather Events: The study didn't just look at average days. It looked at extreme weather events, which we know are becoming more normal. They simulate a Saharan dust storm and an extreme heat wave accompanied by an ozone episode. During the simulated heat wave, they looked at typical human behaviour. We keep the windows closed during the day, and in the evening when it cools down, we throw the windows wide open to purge the heat. But during an ozone episode, when you open those windows in the evening, you are absolutely flooding your home with ozone. The simulation showed indoor ozone levels spiking dramatically, which then reacts with limonene to create massive spikes in secondary organic aerosols. The End of Natural Ventilation as We Know It: This fundamentally challenges our reliance on natural ventilation in the face of climate change. If opening a window to cool down means inviting in extreme heat, extreme ozone or a massive spike in particulate matter from a dust storm, we simply can't rely on that primary strategy anymore. The paper makes an incredibly compelling case that proper strategies of high efficiency filtration, decent ventilation systems and potentially even scrubbers for gases is going to transition from being a luxury in high end office buildings to perhaps an absolute public health necessity in even our residential homes. Our building envelopes may have to act as an environmental shield against increasingly hostile outdoor atmospheres. Long-term prediction of climate change impacts on indoor particle pollution– case study of a residential building in Germany https://doi.org/10.1039/d4em00663a The Air Quality Matters Podcast in Partnership with Particles Plus https://particlesplus.com/ Eurovent (https://www.eurovent.eu/) - Aico (https://www.aico.co.uk/) - Lindab (https://www.lindab.ie/) - S&P UK (https://www.solerpalau.com/en-uk/) The One Take Podcast in Partnership with SafeTraces (https://www.safetraces.com/) - Inbiot (https://www.inbiot.es/?utm_campaign=simon&utm_source=airqualitymatters&utm_medium=podcast) - Farmwood (https://farmwood.co.uk/) - iE Electronics (https://www.eielectronics.ie/) and iAir Group (https://iair-group.com/) Zehnder https://www.zehndergroup.com/en Do check them out in the links and on the Air Quality Matters Website. (https://www.airqualitymatters.net/podcast) If you haven't checked out the YouTube channel its here (https://www.youtube.com/@airqualitymatters-SimonJones). Do subscribe if you can, lots more content is coming soon.
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    6 分
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