Reuters: Plants, especially some trees under stress, are even better than expected at scrubbing certain chemical pollutants out of the air, researchers reported on Thursday. “Plants clean our air to a greater extent than we had realized,” Thomas Karl of the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research, a federally funded research center based in Boulder, Colorado, said in a statement. “They actively consume certain types of air pollution.” Scientists have long known that plants take in …