Dust! Yes, those unnecessary evil

What exactly dust is ?

Let's start thus; over time, dust accumulates even in an empty room. But if one cleans out the dust, you are expected to find that the dust is only made of tiny fine particles of sand. Then you may find that as you fill the room with stuff over time, the dust start to contain tiny fibres of clothing and little particles of virtually everything in that room.

Therefore, dust just is combination of a lot of different tiny particles (varying in size) unconsolidated from the "parent object". They are obviously so light they can reach funny heights and find their way into any place, even through the tiniest opening.

As a matter of fact, dust occur under water. They are just not be blown about like on land. This is possible because apart from the dust on land which find their way into water bodies, animals under water also lose cells and underwater rocks are weathered, underwater organisms die and decay. Also, dust in water is called silt. They settle and become habitat as well as source of nutrients to marine life.

The only difference is that underwater dust are hardly harmful (if at all) to underwater organisms. Whereas land dust can be hazardous to one's health since it's difficult to control, it occurs from a far more variety of sources than underwater dust and it may contain harmful substances.

How the environment contributes to dust :

Dust is a completely natural phenomenon. But it's occurrence or the amount of dust in a place at any time may be naturally or artificially caused or both. You would be surprised the things you would see if the individual constituents of the dust in your house or office are separated and identified.

As such, dust may be "international". Scientific study almost a decade ago revealed that dust accounts for 88 percent of the total amount of airborne particles reaching the United States from overseas after riding very high altitudes.

Plus hammattern, a period of coldness in the dry season characterized by intense dust carried by the trade winds that blow all the way from the north east of Africa through the west of Africa. into the gulf of Guinea is another source of "international dust" 

Obviously, dust is light. So it is easy for wind, light, heavy or mild, to carry it. But the scenarios above are examples of little-bit-more intense scenarios of dust on a regional scale.

Other natural sources or causes of dust include but are not limited to volcanic ash from volcanic eruption, strong winds weathering rocks etc...

There are also unnatural environmental factors like proximity to construction sites, proximity to major roads, proximity to factory building, location of your building to dirt hills and those places where dust are easily stirred up.

Then there are days when dust just seem scarce in the air. This is usually thanks to wetness in the atmosphere. Dust are very light, so when they absorb moisture on humid days, they gain weight and may fall to the ground.

The amount of dust (majorly for homes) basically depend on the cleanness or dirtiness of where you are, as well as how packed or unpacked a place is, such that if objects didn't have much fractures and places were not packed with a lot of belongings, dust would most likely be very unpopular.

And it's constituents depend on the activities around you (obviously).

Possible Effects of dust in homes :

Having lots of dust may have an effect on indoor heat. As it is also possible that when dust falls on snow, they may cause snow to melt faster after the dust is heat-filled.

This means that a room filled with much dust might get warmer on warm days. Therefore, it may be little, but they affect surrounding temperature.

Dust may breed "funny" animals such as snakes, scorpions, cockroaches, spiders and probably animals that complete the ecosystem of the above mentioned animals.

This may be a possibility since the materials that make up dust absorb the temperature of the environment (if they don't receive any heat from another source). This would increase the coolness of tight corners and lead to breeding of the animals mentioned above because they like cold dirty corners.

Dust also messes up electronics performance. For example, a PC's fan clogged up with dust would reduce effective cooling by the system fans and cause the CPUs, GPUs and PSUs to get hot because air is not flowing right.

It could also affect motherboard functionality such that although dust hold little heat "individually", when they get much, they store heat produced by the computer circuits which should be dissipated and can damage the motherboard.

Health wise, the most common effects of dust include running nose and sneezing.

Other probable causes especially for people with certain medical conditions, and depending on the constituents include reduction in lung function, blood poisoning from inhaling lead and zinc, bacterial infections and so on.

How to keep it to a minimum, i.e battling dust:

For preventing dust from the outside to be carried by winds into your homes, one advisable thing to do is to keep windows closed especially on dry days.

And if you live close to construction sites, there's no way dusts won't find its way into your building.

Also, to reduce internally caused dust, you can start with taking out old stuff and stuff that shed a lot of its little parts; like old clothes or old (damp) books.

In other words, you would have to dispose of a lot of stuff, or at least put them away from the normal living environment.

For things in your living space that have a high affinity for dust or high "dust-storing" capacity, little extra care would have to be given to those guys. Those things like rugs and clothes. I'd say they hold the highest amount of dust in a building after those hidden corners, if not more.

One should also involve oneself in periodic cleaning with mops and damp cloths as wet stuff magnet dust really well.