Air Quality

Palembang's airport read 50 meters of visibility on the morning Indonesia's first dry-ice flight was due. A cheap experiment is worth trying, but haze that swings on its own and 1.5 tons of ice against a city's worth of air make success hard to prove.

The acrid, chemical smell in wildfire smoke isn't your imagination — it's benzene and formaldehyde, and sometimes it's literally burning plastic.