This fog study is really interesting! When I was working for the environmental firm, which has been quite some time now, bioremediation of soil and water was fairly new, at least at a commercially implementable level. Finding out that microbes in air can do this, too, is exciting.
Bioremediation firms at the time were using the fact that microbes in polluted soil and water evolve to consume the contaminants. (Sometimes the breakdown products, both from the microbes and from natural decomposition of the compounds, are worse than the original contaminants. Like all things in nature, it's complicated.)
I never actually worked with a bioremediation contractor, because traditional methods like air strippers and removal/incineration were working at our sites but there were several approaches to getting the contaminant-eating microbes to do your work for you. You could make more of them by improving their conditions, such as injecting oxygen or nutrients. You could cultivate beneficial microbes and add them to the contaminated area. You could do those things in situ or you could remove the soil and do them elsewhere.
Anyway, I imagine that this is going to spur new technologies that use similar approaches to clean our air, which seems like a good thing to me. I wonder if any of the newly discovered airborne consume carbon dioxide? That would be awesome.
