Not a simple spray
Today’s spotlight features an illustration, by Christine Daniloff/MIT, of a person sneezing.
Here’s some incentive to cover your mouth the next time you sneeze: New high-speed videos captured by MIT researchers show that as a person sneezes, they launch a viscous sheet of fluid that balloons, then breaks apart in long filaments, and finally disperses as a spray of droplets, similar to paint that is flung through the air.
Using two high-speed cameras, the researchers recorded more than 100 sneezes from healthy human subjects and captured the fraction of a second during which fluid is expelled from the mouth and flung through the air. Almost every sneeze produced the same paint-like pattern of fluid fragmentation, with slight variations: The thicker the fluid, or saliva, the longer the fluid traveled before breaking into droplets.
Read full article.
Here’s some incentive to cover your mouth the next time you sneeze: New high-speed videos captured by MIT researchers show that as a person sneezes, they launch a viscous sheet of fluid that balloons, then breaks apart in long filaments, and finally disperses as a spray of droplets, similar to paint that is flung through the air.
Using two high-speed cameras, the researchers recorded more than 100 sneezes from healthy human subjects and captured the fraction of a second during which fluid is expelled from the mouth and flung through the air. Almost every sneeze produced the same paint-like pattern of fluid fragmentation, with slight variations: The thicker the fluid, or saliva, the longer the fluid traveled before breaking into droplets.
Read full article.