It’s hard to imagine modern life without glycols. They are used in cosmetics, fog machines, and food. As you read this, you’re almost certainly wearing or drinking from something they were used to produce — polyester fabric or plastic bottles, for example. If you brush your teeth with toothpaste or top your salad with bottled dressing, you’ve come into contact with these manmade chemical compounds. Manufactured at industrial scales from crude oil and natural gas, glycols are a common antifreeze ingredient. They are also useful for refrigeration, allowing cooling systems to maintain colder temperatures than water alone allows. But there’s something more they could do for us: When glycols are vaporized into indoor air, they rapidly inactivate viruses, bacteria, and fungal spores — even while the glycol vapors remain at low enough concentrations to be invisible, odorless, and tasteless.…