The magazine Popular Science reported on a paper which found after 20 subjects washed their hands at water temperatures of 100, 80, and 60 degrees, the temperature had no impact on bacterial counts. They also found antibacterial soap was no better than plain soap and water.
What did matter was time—10 to 20 seconds of lathering was better than 5 seconds, and 40 seconds was no better than 10 or 20.
The authors concluded that hands should be washed in water that was most comfortable for the individual.
In a blog post from last year, I pointed out that washing hands for more than 40 seconds, as advocated by a paper in Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology, was impractical due to the excessive amount of time busy hospital staff would need to invest in doing so multiple times per day.
For example, 10 washes per hour at 40 seconds per wash is almost 7 minutes of hand washing times 8 hours equals 56 minutes.
Drivers who follow other drivers
The journal Frontiers in Psychology published a paper called “I’ll Show You the Way: Risky Driver Behavior When ‘Following a Friend.’” The authors, from the Human Systems Engineering department of Arizona State University, found that in order to keep up with the lead driver, drivers who don’t know the way took more chances when they followed someone.
The work was done by testing 16 college student subjects on a simulator. Drivers who followed were more likely to drive significantly faster, change lanes quicker, and in general “engage in riskier behaviors” than when listening to audible directions from a simulated GPS system.
The authors recommended that following another driver to a destination not be done. However if following is necessary, the driver of the lead vehicle should go slower and anticipate what the following driver might have to do to keep up.
1) I think most of us could have predicted the outcome of this research and come up with the same recommendations. 2) Does anyone who drives a car not own a smartphone in 2017?
What not to do with a hotel room tea kettle
A reporter for Gizmodo Australia asked a molecular biology professor from New Zealand’s Massey University to comment. She said, “It is super super super super gross” and pointed out that boiling does not necessarily kill spores formed by some types of bacteria.
Even if boiling killed all known living things, I still wouldn’t want to drink a cup of tea from a kettle that had contained someone’s skivvies the night before.
