Delgadillo+and+Simmons

The world's shrinking.

Or maybe our vision of it is just becoming more accurate, with a little lift from lasers.

Do you ever wake up in the morning to find your car covered in yellow dust? What is that stuff anyway? The answer may surprise you. It's dust blown in from the Sahara Desert.

As winds blow across the African Sahara, sand storms send massive dust plumes into the atmosphere. Vaulting across the Atlantic Ocean, they eventually make it to the shores of Miami.

But the story doesn't end there. Traveling with the sand are bacteria and pollution. They travel in the form of aerosols (MAKE A COMPARISON -- LIKE THOSE YOU USED TO SPRAY FROM ??) that are easily transported across vast distances.

We know this because of a network of special lasers installed on the Florida coast by University of Miami physicists. They point straight up, their light reflecting off the fine aerosol (particles?). (HOW THE LIGHT IS DEFLECTED? REFLECTED? -- BE AS PRECISE AS YOU CAN HERE) The result: vital information that lets us map what's in the airways.

The yellow dust that settles on your car may be annoying -- but the effect on your lungs is more than that. We need to know where the pollution in our skies comes from and where ours lands, too. What goes around comes around -- more quickly than we know, in a world smaller than we imagine.