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May
43, 2003:
The Amazing World Of Dust
Interview
with Hannah Holmes author of The
Secret Life Of Dust
Mike
Carruthers:
What exactly is dust?
Hannah
Holmes:
What isn't dust? The whole world is falling apart and the
inside of your house is falling apart and all of that stuff
ends up in house dust.
Hannah Holmes
author of the book The
Secret Life Of Dust says a lot of house dust is dead skin.
We do
shed a huge amount-fifty million flakes of skin everyday. So,
almost half of your dust is made up of skin flakes and bits
of your clothing.
But dust
is a lot more important than you might think. In fact, it couldn't
rain without dust.
There
is always water vapor up in the sky, but one molecule of water
will not just go up to another molecule of water and stick together.
They have to have something they can stick to in common, and
that is dust. So, every raindrop that falls has formed on a
piece of dust and either dissolved that dust into itself, or
in the case of snow it'll be a little hard piece of dust right
in the middle of the snowflake.
Dust falls
to earth from outer space at the rate of 40,000 tons a year,
and that dust is full of diamonds.
Space
dust originally forms when an old star dies and explodes. The
leftover gases from the dead star eventually condense in space.
When those gases are made up of carbon then what condenses is
diamonds. So floating through our solar system are just boatloads
of space diamonds.
Tomorrow,
why there is probably dinosaur dust in your house.
I'm Mike
Carruthers and that's "Something You Should Know."
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