Sunday, April 10, 2005
The dandruff cloud
Millions of tons of dandruff are circling the Earth, blocking out sunlight, causing rain and spreading disease, startling new research shows.
Flaky as it may seem, the research - partly funded by the German government - may provide the solution to one of the world's most enduring pollution mysteries: the origin of much of the vast clouds of fine dust in the atmosphere. It suggests that more than half of the dust is a rich soup of organic detritus, including particles of decaying leaves, animal hair, dead skin and dandruff.
The research is published in the April issue of Science magazine by Dr Ruprecht Jaenicke of Mainz University - who has been leading the study for the past 15 years - and says "it has got to be taken very seriously".
Apparently, there are a billion tons of organic detritus in the air. We don't know how much of it is dandruff, which is good, because that is knowledge that would upset a lot of people. Still, we all have to be worried about our little local clouds of miniscule organic matter.
"Whenever you brush your hair or take off a sweater, you release a cloud of biological dust," he says. "When a bird flies through the air it leaves behind particles from its feathers, and when the wind blows through a tree it releases dust from the leaves."
He has, however, not yet done the work to break down the constituents of the dust clouds, so that he can tell precisely how much is dandruff.
I hope it's not a lot.
1 Comments:
By 
TigerHawk, at
Tue Apr 12, 06:59:00 AM:
Heh. That is a good question. If you're right (and you may well be), a lot of newspapers fell for it, too. The Independant published its story on April 10.
