14 DAY TRIAL // Everyone who has ever wiped out dust from an entire house can tell you that, just hours after cleaning, the stuff always returns undisturbed, as if nothing ever happened. This is naturally a nuisance to people who spend hours trying to clean up. Most of us have also wondered as to where all the dust keeps coming from, and now Science is ready to provide us with an answer. Experts have created a new computer simulation, which was able to model the behavior of the fine dust particles inside a home, and give people the answer they sought.
In their investigation, a number of scientists took on the difficult task of transforming the everyday behavior of common dust inside a house into a set of complex mathematical equations, which they then fed into the computer model. They wanted to know how particles hitch rides on the small grains. The reason why this is important is fairly simple. In addition to dead skin cells, chemicals and soil particles, dust may also carry inside homes contaminants such as lead and arsenic, which can poison people. These dangerous chemicals can come, for example, from a nearby contaminated water site.
“It's pretty difficult to figure out how much you need to clean the soil to protect people in their homes. So this model will help in identifying what are the appropriate levels to clean the soil to,” University of Arizona College of Public Health assistant professor Paloma Beamer says. She was also a researcher with the new study. Details of the team's findings appear in the November 1 issue of the scientific journal Environmental Science & Technology, LiveScience informs.
One of the conclusions the new simulations came to was the fact that not all dust entering homes comes from dusty shoes. Rather, the largest amount comes in via air itself, as they are light enough to get airborne. Other factors, that the team took into account in their model, refer to the number of people living in the household, the time they spent inside and outside, as well as how much they walked on carpets. The latter are a potent source of dust in any house, regardless of how much cleaning is done. The fine particles that are emitted can easily find their way inside lungs or on children's hands.