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Show I M p " Farmington Junior High seventh grade class officers are Megan Whitmer, vice president; Ashley Maw, secretary; and John Peterson, president. JDust mites By JILLYN SMITH Science Writer Utah State University This weekend, after I vacuumed, I settled down with David Bodanis' book, "The Secret House." It's a shocker, a thriller taking the reader through "24 hours in the strange and unexpected world in which we spend our nights and days," our own homes. Among other things, Bodanis told me about the dust mites I had just vacuumed up: "...creatures, of a diminutiveness to put then just below the limit of unaided sight, that live peacefully in your carpets and bed, feeding on whatever skin flakes happen to trickle down in the general stream of dust from above. On their size scale the carpet fibers are massive trees..." Dust mites, 8-legged relatives of spiders, were discovered only in 1965, and it's since been found that no matter how clean a house is, they're there. Because vacuuming also brings in food for them, Bodanis told me that once things settle down in the vacuum bag, the mites happily feed and reproduce. When I change the vacuum bag, some will probably make it back to the carpet. Vacuums are such a good way to collect dust mites, and the bags such a good place to raise more, researchers use them as a source of their lab populations. The vacuum, by the way, writes Bodanis, was invented by H. Cecil Booth, who made ferris wheels for a living. In 1901, he saw a new rail car cleaning apparatus that used an air compressor and proposed to clear dust by blowing air at it, a sort of mechanized broom. Booth realized the generator could be switched on backwards and used to suck, not blow. "The concept was so awesome that he needed to test it without delay. Booth returned to his office, knelt down on the floor, spread his lips over the carpet and proceeded to suck in furiously. He fell back gagging and choking, his mouth full of dust, ecstatic..." The first "suction sweepers" were huge, pulled by horses. They were attended by workers from Booth's ferris wheel factory, who passed a hose in through the windows win-dows of people willing to try the new device people who were unaware un-aware of the existence of dust mites. Ignorance is bliss, I suppose. We can sleep tight, though, because be-cause the dust mites don't bite. They probably make us sneeze once in a while, but we just think it's dust. |