Thursday Things: Wash Your Hands Edition
26 March 2020. Vol 2 No 13. By Dan McGirt. #33
Welcome to Thursday Things! Many of us are spending some quality time indoors this week. I hope you are safe, healthy, and fully stocked.
Remember to wash your hands! Photo by Noah on Unsplash
Glen Reynolds shares 5 tips to keep you sane during the coronavirus crisis. Number one is thank your grocery store clerk. You should! They, along with all the healthcare workers, are helping us all get through the difficult present moment.
Why wash your hands? “Keeping hands clean is one of the most important steps we can take to avoid getting sick and spreading germs to others. Many diseases and conditions are spread by not washing hands with soap and clean, running water.”
Soap doesn't kill germs on our hands, it removes them.
Germs stick to the oils and grease on our hands (sounds yucky, but it's totally normal). Water alone won't remove much of the germs on our hands because water and oil don't like each other, so they won't mix. But soap likes both water and oil. That's because soap molecules are a type of surfactant, which means they have one end that's water loving, or hydrophilic, and one end that's oil loving, or hydrophobic.
When you wash your hands with soap, the soap molecules act as a mediator between the water and oil molecules, and bind with both of them at the same time. Then when you rinse everything off, the soap carries away the germs with the water.
Many businesses large and small are stepping up to do their part in the current crisis. I could fill ten issues of Thursday Things with examples. I’ll just list one this week (unless you want more, Happy Subscribers! You can always email your suggestions, or leave a comment on the web edition!) because it has a certain MacGyver feel to it, which is cool: How Ford Is Using Seat Ventilation Fans to Build Thousands of Respirators:
Ford announced today that it is partnering with 3M in order to manufacture powered air-purifying respirators (PAPRs) as part of its response to the COVID-19 pandemic. These respirators are often called positive-pressure masks as they take contaminated air, pull it through a filter, then push it to the sealed mask using an air blower.
Ford will assist by providing components from their parts bin to build the respirators. The design released by Ford (top) will use 3M filters that draw air into a blower motor sourced from an F-150 and then pushed through a tube up to a mask that is sealed to the user's face.
The blower motor is sourced from the F-150's front seat assembly and is usually employed as part of the ventilated seat option. These motors are compact and run on 12 volts in the car, so they can be used with a battery pack in a situation where they need to be portable.
Seat blower motors may not seem like the first choice, but they are actually matched quite well to the blowers that are usually present in these types of respirators.
What I love about this story is the ingenuity. We need more respirators? But we have them — if we just hack together some existing components typically used for something else! To wit:
The great thing about using off-the-shelf parts is that most of the pieces needed to assemble these respirators are available in fairly large quantities. The seat blower motors can be pulled off the shelf by Ford and they can request more from their suppliers if needed. The drill battery packs use a standard interface and are available from the original equipment manufacturers as well as many aftermarket sources.
American ingenuity at its finest!
Continuing the MacGyver theme, I enjoyed this item too: NASA fixes Mars lander by telling it to hit itself with a shovel. This comes after several years of trying other things. The digital dashboard on my car (which is older than Facebook) often blinks out and I fix it by whacking the dash, so I probably would gone with the shovel move first thing. But NASA didn’t call me for suggestions. More details on this ingenious solution at Popular Science
If you want to use extra time on your hands to learn how to play guitar (or ukulele!) Fender is currently offering a free 3-month subscription to their Fender Play tuition app to anyone who wants to learn acoustic or electric guitar, bass or ukulele. The more people who play the ukulele the better the world is!
New genetic editing powers discovered in squid I did not know squid could do that. I’m not even sure what it means. But it is impressive:
Revealing yet another super-power in the skillful squid, scientists have discovered that squid massively edit their own genetic instructions not only within the nucleus of their neurons, but also within the axon—the long, slender neural projections that transmit electrical impulses to other neurons. This is the first time that edits to genetic information have been observed outside of the nucleus of an animal cell.
Not that you should be hanging out at the beach right now anyway — but maybe don’t hang out at the beach right now. This item submitted by a Happy Subscriber: Group of Feasting Great White Sharks Moves to South Carolina
The great white shark party that’s been raging off the coast of North Carolina for the better part of this month has shifted, experts say.
Satellite data from the nonprofit OCEARCH shows that the majority of the group has moved on to the area between Myrtle Beach and Charleston. Seven great white sharks are now “pinging” in that region, while two remain off North Carolina’s Crystal Coast, The State reports.
The Carolinas are on the sharks' path between their fall aggregation sites up north and their winter foraging area off the Southeast Coast. While it’s normal for great white sharks to be there, experts are calling such a large, cohesive grouping of the predators an anomaly.
Again — don’t go to parties right now. Especially if you get invited to a great white shark party! Chum means something entirely different to them.
As an author of novels, I like this item: People who read live longer than those who don’t, Yale researchers say
Bookworms rejoice! A new study in the journal Social Science and Medicine just discovered that people who read books live longer than people who don't. …
Over the course of the study, the researchers consistently found that both groups of readers lived longer than the non-readers. The readers who read over 3.5 hours a week lived a full 23 months longer than the people who didn't read at all. That extended lifespan applied to all reading participants, regardless of "gender, wealth, education or health" factors, the study explains. That's a 20% reduction in mortality created by a sedentary activity. That's a big deal, and a very easy fix for improving quality of life in anyone over 50.
Want to live longer? Read a book!
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