This is scientific American 60 second science. I'm Christopher Intagiyata.

Air pollution outside is easy to spot, hanging over the city or sputtering from a tailpipe.

But there's a lot of indoor air pollution too,

even if it's not as obvious.

It's caused by volatile organic compounds, or VOCs.

They can come from building materials like paint, carpets and adhesives, vinyl floors, varnishes, solvents, etc. Vadud Niri, an analytical chemist at the State University of New York Oswego.

And also they can come from home and personal care products like cleaning chemicals, air fresheners, cosmetics.

And that cosmetics part is what caught Nere's attention.

One day when I went to a nail salon with my wife, I noticed the smell of specifically acetone in there, and since I was doing it analysis in that time, I thought maybe we can do something about this.

Acetone can irritate your eyes, skin, nose and throat and at high concentrations

can cause nausea, headaches or other nervous system problems.

Nerei figured that one way to get rid of acetone might be with house plants.

So we reviewed decades of literature in the field of plants as environmental cleanup agents, which is called

biofiltration or phytoremediation.

He then ran his own experiment using an airtight chamber, 8 VOCs in concentrations similar to those found in nail salons and five common house

plants. A jade plant, a spider plant, a bromeliad, a Caribbean tree cactus, and what's known as a Dracina plant.

Turns out after a 12-hour test, it was the bromeliad that scrubbed the most chemicals from the air.

But as for his original quest, removing acetone from nail salons, the Drosina beat all the others, sucking

up 94% of the offensive compound.

He presented the results at a meeting of the American Chemical Society in Philadelphia.

Niri hasn't worked out all the details on the nail salon solution yet.

That's next. But for a house or apartment, he says.

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