Street Pollution from cars/trains

Dec 20, 2014 • 12:19 PM UTC

64-66 Townsend St, San Francisco, CA 94107, USA

140x Magnification

Fungi

Manu Prakash

I am a faculty at Stanford and run the Prakash Lab at Department of Bioengineering at Stanford University. Foldscope community is at the heart of our Frugal Science movement - and I can not tell you how proud I am of this community and grassroots movement. Find our work here: http://prakashlab.stanford.edu

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I live on a street with Muni and heavy car traffic – and on my walks I always notice all plants completely covered with this black soot. My balcony also gets filled with this black stuff every day. It must rising high above since I live on 6th floor apartment building – so it’s airborne for some time.
Today morning I took the foldscope tape; touched it to the black stuff and looked under the foldscope. Aha… Black carbon soot. Surprisingly these are fairly large particles (mag 140x). The whole experiment took me less than 2 min 🙂

Think about it; what does it mean for our lungs, our plants, our environment and our atmosphere? And it’s everywhere. Tell me what does street pollution look like at microscopic scale on your streets.