Hacker News Reader

Hello,

Thank you for sharing this.

I'm genuinely wondering how our nose is not a good enough sensor. Are there common cases that affect large areas like the one you live in, where the pollution is not smellable?

Thank you

View on HN

In my area in the winter you always sense air pollution.

But with just a nose it's hard to say if it's 100 μg/m3 of or 200 μg/m3 of PM2.5.

I never could smell the pollution in Bangkok. I don't think people in LA could smell the smog. Certainly when we had wildfire smoke here near Seattle a couple years ago, I could not always smell it. Sometimes when it was heavy, you could smell smoke right when you went outside, but not always... and your nose gets used to it really quickly. But like, that was pollution you could see, the skies were dark and orange. Not really typical pollution levels that people live in every day.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com