While the medical community has made huge strides in understanding how pathogens cause

disease and developing treatments to fight against infection, detecting airborne viruses

and preventing them from entering our bodies remains unreasonably difficult.

And by difficult, I mean virtually impossible, because there's not a whole lot to protect

us when we breathe.

But there's hope—and it comes in the form of our fourth state of matter, plasma.

Engineers just demonstrated a proof of concept plasma reactor that inactivated or removed

99.9% of a test virus from the air in a fraction of a second

Prized for its powerful disinfecting qualities, plasma has found applications in plenty of

industries to chemically extract particles from the air, but using it to target viruses

is a totally novel application.

Viruses are the most abundant biological entity on Earth, and some of them, like measles and

the common cold, travel by way of sneezing, coughing, and breathing.

And do they travel.

Sneezes can launch germs up to 8 meters in a matter of minutes, where many can remain

alive in the air for hours.

There's even a theory that viruses are able to hop on the backs of dust and soil particles

and coast around the world on high-altitude air currents.

The global air purifier market is projected to reach approximately 6.2 Billion U.S. dollars

by 2023, so clearly this is a thing.

And if you have one at home, it's probably either one that's designed to trap particles

in a filter, or deactivate them through a chemical reaction.

All have their downfalls.

Electronic air filters like electrostatic precipitators can be efficient for extracting

particles, but they don't remove gases and smells and can produce harmful by-products.

Mechanical systems, like HEPA filters, can have difficulty capturing and removing all

pollutants that enter an indoor space, especially one that's not air-tight.

They also tend to have trouble with microorganisms and bacteria bypassing the filter.

Another type of air purifier, like ozone generators, are specifically designed to deactivate or

destroy pollutants.

But they actually just release an inorganic molecule that's a toxic component of smog.

So what makes plasma so promising?

Let's break it down.

First observed by Sir William Crookes in 1879, plasma is the fourth state of matter after

liquids, gases, and solids.

It's comprised of a cloud of free-flowing ions, or electrically charged atoms, but the

cloud itself has no overall charge.

While plasma exists when molecules are heated to extremely high temperatures, it can also

occur at room temperature if the molecules are exposed to a strong electrical field.

This is known as cold plasma, aka non-thermal plasma, and it's the kind we want to use

if we want breathable air—I mean, normal plasma could make things clean too, we just

can't breathe air at that high a temperature.

Now, just to be clear, plasma is already being explored by industries to take pollutants

out of our air and water.

But using plasma to rip viruses apart?

That's a whole new ball of electrons that engineers at the University of Michigan just

unraveled.

Using a cold plasma reactor, they were able to inactivate or remove 99.9% of a test virus

from their experimental airstream in a fraction of a second.

It works like this: as the virus flows into the reactor pipe, a large voltage is introduced

to create an electric discharge, or spark.

A bed of dielectric beads sandwiched between the electrodes maintain the spark of plasma,

whose unstable atoms oxidize the virus as it moves through the pipe.

Upon exiting, the virus is merely a shell of its former self—with an extremely diminished

capacity for infecting a host.

However, it's not entirely clear how cold plasma works to inactivate viruses: it could

be that the presence of the electric field causes their shells to expand and rupture,

or that the fragments of the air molecules chemically attack them.

But hey, it works.

This successful proof of concept holds a whole lot of promise for putting the brakes on airborne

viruses.

It combines both air purification and inactivation of airborne pathogens, making it a more effective

option for disease control than the air filters we currently have.

The University of Michigan team has already begun trialing cold plasma's effectiveness

at nearby livestock farms, where the risk of animals contracting airborne viruses is

extremely high.

Because if we breathe 3,400 gallons of air per day, it'd be great if it were virus-free.

And we humans breathe a lot, an average of 3,400 gallons per day.

Did you know that sneezes can launch germs up to 38 yards per second?

If you want to learn more about viruses, check out Sick,

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I'll see you next time, thanks for watching.