Q&A
EXISTENTIAL FEAR OF THE MONTH...
…THERE’S POO EVERYWHERE
OT TO MAYO (11 YE ARS OLD)
WHAT ARE THE WIGGLY THINGS I SEE IN MY EYES WHEN I LOOK AT THE SKY?
It’s true. Last year, London Metropolitan University conducted swab tests on the self-order touchscreens in eight McDonald’s restaurants and found faecal bacteria on all of them. This isn’t because these restaurants are dirty: it’s because their customers are, and so are you. Every one of us has about 0.1 grams of poop trapped in our butt crack at any given time. This spreads to our clothes, then our hands and then to every surface we touch. You can clean the bathroom as much as you want, but bacteria are distributed as a fine mist every time you flush the toilet and will hang in the air for up to two hours, waiting to land on the next person
to walk in. And your kitchen sponge, which you use to clean the dishes, has twice as many bacteria per square centimetre as your bathroom. In fact, every door handle, TV remote, keyboard, lift button, bus handrail and car seat has detectable amounts of either your poo, or someone else’s. Of course, poo has always been everywhere: we just didn’t have the tools to detect it until the 20th Century. And it’s nothing to worry about. If your immune system is working properly, the low levels of contamination present today aren’t enough to make you sick. But washing your hands before you eat in a public place is always a good idea. LV
When looking up at a blue sky, many people see tiny dots in their field of vision that follow squiggly lines. These move in sync with our pulse, brie�y accelerating with every heartbeat, and they usually disappear a�er about a second. The dots are actually white blood cells moving along the fine blood vessels (capillaries) in front of the retina at the back of the eye. This experience is called the ‘blue field entoptic phenomenon’ because it’s especially noticeable when looking into bright blue light, such as a cloudless sky. Whereas red blood cells absorb blue light, white blood cells do not, so they let the light through to the retina. Light-sensitive cells in the retina read this as a signal of increased brightness, causing us to see the white blood cells as spots. ED
30 cm
44 The length that the empress tree (Paulownia tomentosa) is capable of growing in three weeks
77