Sunday, December 27, 2020

Brainiac Answers Ridiculous Question About Bacteria


This must be the smartest answer to one of the dumbest questions we've seen in a long time. 

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Text - When you spit in the urinal and there's a string of saliva, do the bacteria have time to go inside your mouth? Anoop Sinha, Taught microbiology to medical undergrads for >10 years Updated Sep 29 - Upvoted by Prafful Sharma, M.Sc Microbiology, Savitribai Phule Pune University (2019) Vibrio is one of the fastest bacteria around, if not the fastest. If you see live Vibrio under the microscope, they seem to zip around like Barry Allen navigating through Central city. Image from https://www.an

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Text - micrometers per second. Another website gives a figure of 200 micrometers per second, and cites the McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Science and Technology as its reference (I could not verify this). I'm inclined to accept the lower estimate, as it is from a scientific, peer-reviewed journal. For an organism that's barely 2 micrometers in length, these are incredible speeds. It's like an average adult human running at 75 to 200 meters per second (270 - 720 km per hr or 168 - 447 miles per hr).

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Text - Image from https://www.todayonline.com/sing... Z 50 cm = 500000 micrometers. That's a loooong bridge! (Public domain image from pxhere.com 2) Time taken for traversing 500000 micrometres when moving at 200 micrometers per second = 500000/200 %3D = 2500 seconds. That's close to 42 minutes. Hah! I knew Douglas Adams was onto something! 42 is the answer to life, the universe and everything! If we go by the more realistic estimate of bacterial speed (75 microns per second), this increases to

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Text - minutes. So, if a bacterium is to travel from a urinal to your mouth on a bridge of salivary mucus, then all of the following criteria have to be satisfied: 1. The urinal should be harbouring Vibrio. 2. The top speed of this bacterium is assumed to be 200 micrometers per second. 3. This bacterium must be moving upwards continuously at top speed. 4. You should stand still for about 42 minutes. 5. The salivary bridge should remain stable for this time period. So, to answer your question...

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