I first met my terrible dust bunny , cowering under a soon - to - be interchange video card . It was 2003 . Since then , he has puffed around in my periphery , a dusty daemon on my figurative shoulder . And in my literal apartments .
I threw him out with the fritzy Radeon , and vowed to in good order clean my computer casing from then on . So he migrated .
From the unexpended rear street corner of my gaming computer , he buck to the corner of my college student residence , behind the TV and out of sight . In my first apartment , he develop bolder and more proudly disgusting ; I caught him twice next to the bath threshold . In apartments with strict cleaning rotas , he cash in one’s chips into concealment , but could usually find the foot of a bedpost , or a closet recess , or a heavy contrivance to hide near . Just last month , I found him in the middle of the hall , sitting motionless at the hardwood nexus of filth . It was n’t clear if he ’d come from a bedroom , from underneath the nearby fridge , or if he ’d rolled a few more groundwork , tumbleweed - style , from the bathroom . Did n’t matter . He was back , he was gross , and nigh a decennary later , I still had no mind where he had come from , or how he had organise .
What is Dust?
Let ’s arrange aside the bunny girl for a 2d , and focus on the filth . debris is everywhere . Fine sand is rock junk . Rubber , brakepad and pavement particles are route dust . Fine ash can be volcanic detritus . Hell , Carl Sagan splendidly and repeatedly referred to Earth as a “ speck of detritus , ” albeit in a cosmic good sense . But the dust we ’re talking about , dust bunny rabbit dust , is a specific thing , with a specific recipe . And a studied one ! agree to David W. Layton and Paloma I. Beamer , who coauthored a paper send for ‘ Migration of Contaminated Soil and Airborne Particulates to Indoor Dust , ’ typical menage dust in a midwestern home iscomprised of the following :
Indoor debris is a mixture of soil tracked into a residence , particulate matter matter derived from ambient out-of-door air , and significantly , constituent matter inputs from various sources . A salient feature of indoor dust is its organic material content , with levels of about 40 wt % in residential housing .
Soil , pollen , and airborne dirt atom were to be require , and account for over one-half of junk ’s weight . Makes sense ! Outside is full of turd , and every time we return to our homes , we convey some of that back .
So , Drs Layton and Beamer , what about that other 40 % . The “ organic thing , ” as you call it :
lint , hide particles , organic fibers , food debris , etc .
That other 40 % is you : your solid food , your peel , your hair , and your wearing apparel ’ lint . Or perhaps your dog ’s ! But mostly just yours , you disgusting , shedding beast .
The closer you look , the worse it catch . For afeaturein a 1986 issue of Discover Magazine ( viathe Straight Dish ) , Penny Moser took sampling of dust from her home to a research laboratory , where she take a look at a mates of them through a microscope :
Pathologist Charles McLeod act his centre over the prepared slide containing my dust ball … “ Here`s part of an insect , ” he said , “ either a chitinous shield or a body fragment . Here ’s a human hair . ” It was mine . I could say because I periodically give myself a henna rinse , and under the microscope the hair showed burst of Raging Raspberry or Autumn Copper slap onto mouse brown .
We derive across an Alternaria mold spore , which looked like a metameric honeyed potato , and a roundworm egg , which I did n’t want to love much more about . On this lantern slide , as on all the slides , there were many bantam blasphemous and pink fibers . “ They ’re raw fibers , ” McLeod said . “ you could tell by the flat , irregular shape . In your neighbor ’s radiator dust we have a semisynthetic disconsolate fiber . plausibly from something like a pair of disconsolate pantyhose . ” The radiator dust also had a ghastly looking thing that resembled chicken feet , but was just a petite hair cluster from the bottom of a foliage . From under the kitchen stove we establish boracic - Zen vitreous silica — a cockroach contraceptive — and some yeast . There were also cat tomentum , pollen and more pinkish and dreary fibers .
Insect part , hair , mold , louse eggs , unidentifiable fibers , pantyhose screw thread , leaf haircloth , barm and Mexican valium toxicant . And that was the least worrying of the samples . From under her bottom :
The midget toenail fragment didn`t nark me and the clay sculpture spores I could live with — but not the horrible hairy matter that depend like a lobster claw . “ That ’s the limb of something that ’s been dismembered , ” McLeod said matter - of - factly . It was n’t a min before he found a whole one . “ I ’ve never seen anything quite like this , ” he pronounce . “ It seems to have mouth part on its feet and lamella - like twist . ” It was to me , without a doubt , the ugliest thing I had ever seen . It looked like an angry rhinoceros with crustacean appendages .
This turned out to be a dust mite , an exceedingly vernacular , invisible - to - the - naked - center beast that lives in most of our home , feeding off the peel that we invariably exuviate .
Every one of these ingredients , however , is dead . Whether it ’s an insect stiff , a disembodied hair , or flakes of epidermis , it ’s all idle . Dead dust has no will , no intent . So why does it bundle as if it does ?
The origin of dust bunnies, the universe, and everything
Dust is just dust . It ’s not readily evident why little tiny corpuscle of one affair or another would bundle together , and even less obvious how all these flecks and molecule and grains come to behave in seemingly consistent ways : mould in corners , or edges ; seem in clusters ; preferring animation indoors alternatively of out . Albeit a oil and canonical one , rubble bunny girl are a scheme , and systems have to emerge from somewhere , by some mechanism .
Make that mechanism , plural form . Dust begins to bunnify by doing what dust does expert : settle . But because rubble is made of so many unlike material , it settles in lots of dissimilar ways . Hair , bombastic tegument scales and visible scandal are put mostly by predictable forces , like zephyr from a vent ( molecule may root in the small eddie , or swirl , near a vent opening ) or my strong-arm movement ( which is why dust bunnies often appear behind doorway — they’ve been swept there ) . Smaller particles incline to stay airborne for long periods of time , dropping at rate of just a foot an hour for sub - micron dust mote .
These smaller particles can be take to surprising locales , propel by obscure , super - elusive air flow . As still as your home ’s atmosphere may feel , it ’s in constant movement . Your ventilation , your gismo ’s exhaust fumes , and your heating and cooling systems are source of menstruation , the direction and patterns of which are seldom observe , except through the debris bunnies they aid create .
But airflows and walking paths and the comparable can only tell us where dust bunnies will be ; they do n’t differentiate us why they form . For that , we turn to cosmology .
A popular possibility about the shaping of our solar arrangement , and others , for that matter , is that many of the early consistency of the galaxy just sort of … cluster up . Says Richard Cowen , in his book , ‘ chronicle of Life ’ :
Dust particles collide softly and be given to stick together by electrostatic and gravitational attractive force in a process called accretion . Around a new star , the dust bunnies can build up and compact into substantial solid masses a kilometre or so in diam . Computer models show that in only a few million years , several thousand consistency the size of it of large asteroid will coalesce into larger units that we now see as planets .
This same principle is generally applicable to household dust , says Cowen , whose possibility isechoedby astrophysicist luminary Neil deGrasse Tyson : “ [ Accretion ] explains the origin of rubble bunnies under your couch . ”
With much respect for our astrophysically disposed friends , in the gravity - bound context of a base the tiny amount of stable electricity present in motes of dust are only useful for explain why ok particles stick together . It takes a stronger bond to hold one of those mouse - like nest of refuse together . Baylor University aperient professor Lorin MatthewstoldEsquire last year , “ The forces that have got the detritus bunnies together can be the embroiled fibers themselves . They get matt-up , much like lint or felt . ”
Once all those larger tegument , hair and insect corpuscle meet , in other words , they just get their come-on into one another , and do n’t let go . This might seem improbable from our macro , human perspective , but a glance through even a low - power microscope will show the constitutional percentage of a typical dust bunny to be much gnarlier , and therefore much more prostrate to snarling to one another , than they seem from Up Here .
There are other underage culprit , like the cookery of fatty foods , which produces triglyceride that canattach to dust particles , making them stickier . All the causes , though , share one characteristic : they ’re elusive . It ’s either electrostatic force that are nearly inconceivable to evaluate , or airflows that are inconceivable to feel , or fat deposits that are an unavoidable and obscure byproduct of preparing essentially any delicious intellectual nourishment .
Actually , make that two characteristic : without dust , they ca n’t exist . So get cleaning .
cosmosDustRabbits
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