Strange but true: Test clears air about sneezing into mask
Strange but true: Test clears air about sneezing into mask

By Bill Sones and Rich Sones, Ph.D.

Published: July 15, 2008

Q:It's a problem faced by baseball catchers, welders and surgeons: How do you sneeze with a mask covering your face?

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A:Catchers and welders only have to deal with the unpleasant bounce-back, but surgeons have to worry about spraying multitudinous microbes directly into the open wound they've created, says Steve Mirsky in Scientific American magazine. So, how do you avoid an uh-oh following an achoo? As reported in the British Medical Journal, the accepted wisdom has been to sneeze while facing the sensitive area so the mask will redirect the ejecta backward and out the sides, i.e., away from the open wound. But when two plastic surgeons from a British hospital scoured the literature, they could find no actual evidence for this advice, so they set out to test it, using high-speed photography and some finely ground pepper sniffed by masked volunteers.

Upshot: Very little of the blast goes sideways, though a bit sneaks out the bottom onto the surgeon's upper chest.

Most of it apparently stays safely with the doctor, leaving the patient pristine. At this point, advised the Journal, "it's best for surgeons to follow their instincts when sneezing during operations.”

Q:What are scientists thinking creating robot cockroaches when there are already too many real ones to contend with?

A:The tiny robo-roaches lack legs, wings or antennae, but the wheeled machines pass muster with their real "peers,” at least once the bots are scented with roach pheromones, says Elizabeth Pennisi in Science magazine.

In fact, they're so well accepted they become part of the insects' collective decision-making process. And by tricking the roaches into making bad decisions, the robo-roaches are helping people win the battle with the bugs.

The key is that the robots are autonomous, able to interact on their own. At first they were programmed to hang out in the darker places cockroaches prefer but then to switch to lighter areas in hopes the real ones would follow suit, hiding in more vulnerable locations. Instead of the robots "rounding up the cockroaches like sheepdogs,” they work via social attraction. This is a powerful idea with many applications beyond pest control, said Massachusetts Institute of Technology robotocist Daniela Rus, possibly including the mechanical herding of livestock.

Q:How long before English language standards fall by the wayside and speakers start saying things such as she "haved” a headache yesterday and he "holded” the book at arm's length as he "readed” it?

A:This isn't a standards issue but the normal tendency for irregular verbs to be replaced by regular verbs over time, says Stephen Ornes in Discover magazine. In English, the past tense of a regular verb ends in "ed,” like "helped.” But the past tense of an irregular verb follows no easy rule, such as "have” and "hold” becoming "had” and "held.”

Harvard mathematicisn Erez Lieberman says irregular verbs have a "half life” that allows predicting how long before they become regularized. He studied 177 Old English verbs and devised a formula showing that regularization occurs faster when verbs are infrequently used. "Have,” for example, is used 100 times more often than "hold,” so "held” likely will become "holded” in about 5,400 years, but it may take 38,800 years for "had” to become "haved.” The next irregular verbs likely to fall include infrequently used ones such as "slink,” Ornes says. And in a few thousand years, it might be normal to say, "That was an interesting story I just readed.”

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