Purdue University researchers built this bizarre crawling robot baby to study how real infants kick up dirt and bacteria from carpet that they then inhale. Engineer Brandon Boor and his colleagues ran the robot over carpet samples removed from people's homes and then analyzed the particulates that were stirred up. Turns out that the particle concentration is as much as 20 times greater than higher up in the room where we adults breathe. That isn't necessarily bad though, Boor says.
"Many studies have shown that inhalation exposure to microbes and allergen-carrying particles in that portion of life plays a significant role in both the development of, and protection from, asthma and allergic diseases," says Boor, an assistant professor of civil engineering and environmental and ecological engineering. "There are studies that have shown that being exposed to a high diversity and concentration of biological materials may reduce the prevalence of asthma and allergies later in life."
(Purdue University)
40 years of Reaganomic sociopathy has managed to convince hundreds of millions of otherwise sensible people that big, social problems are caused by their personal choices, and not (say) by rapacious corporations that corrupt the regulatory process in order to get away with literal and figurative murder. The Intercept's Sharon Lerner made a short doc […]
As of Jan 1, a new International Maritime Organisation standard will seriously restrict the kind of air pollution that shipping vessels can emit; in response, the industry has invested more than $12b in "open-loop scrubbers," which capture the sulphur from heavy fuel oil exhaust and reroute it, along with CO2, into waste water that is […]
Gavin and Alice Munro are serious about sustainability. On a two-acre field in England’s Midlands, they’re growing trees that are trained into forming the shape of furniture, including chairs.
If you’re just jumping into app development for Apple’s devices, you’ve picked a heady time. The new iOS 13 has a ton of new features: A versatile SwiftUI language, a boosted role for Siri and a more robust Photos app, just to name a few. And if you’re making the transition from iOS 12? Get […]
Most people don’t spare a lot of thought on the potting for their plants. Perhaps something with a color that matches the walls, but that’s as far as it goes. After all, the plants don’t care what they’re wearing. Do they? Actually, they might. As eye-catching as the AIRSAI Floating Bonsai Plant Pot is, its […]
With the gains real estate has made over stocks in the past 25 years, it’s easy to see why the rich constantly use it to expand their wealth. What’s slightly less obvious is why only the rich seem to ever break into real estate investment. There are a lot of reasons, but a couple of […]
