Cleaning with spit, and now with pillars and pancakes

Last month human saliva got its due, with the awarding of the 2018 Ig Nobel Prize for chemistry, as an effective agent to clean surfaces. This month, pillars and pancakes are served up as an effective way to pattern surfaces so that those surfaces will be self-cleaning. Pillar/pancake details are in the new study “Pillars […]

Techniques in Saliva Collection: Bacon Smell Rules, Lozenge Drools

Certain studies are tongue in cheek. This certain study is interested in the fluids between the tongue and cheek. Mouthwatering science abounds in the article, “New Techniques for Augmenting Saliva Collection: Bacon Rules and Lozenge Drools.” Hoping to find a method that increases the rate mouth fluids can be collected, researchers had volunteers’ saliva analyzed […]

What the Frog’s Saliva Does for the Frog’s Tongue

Ig Nobel Prize winner David (“urination duration in mammals”) Hu and colleagues turned their intense gaze toward frog tongues and saliva. They published this study: “Frogs use a viscoelastic tongue and non-Newtonian saliva to catch prey,” Alexis C. Noel, Hao-Yuan Guo, Mark Mandica, David L. Hu, Journal of the Royal Society Interface, 2017, 14, 20160764. […]

How much saliva does a five-year-old kid produce? (podcast #92)

How do you measure how much saliva a five-year-old kid produces in a day? A Japanese study describes one approach, and we go with that flow (to an extent), in this week’s Improbable Research podcast. SUBSCRIBE on Play.it, iTunes, or Spotify to get a new episode every week, free. This week, Marc Abrahams discusses a published saliva-filled study, with dramatic readings from Nicole Sharp, creator of FYFD, the internet’s most popular […]

Parents’ Saliva: A Cleaning Fluid for Pacifiers

The presumed link between cleanliness and parental goodliness may need a slight refocusing, suggests this study: “Pacifier Cleaning Practices and Risk of Allergy Development,” Bill Hesselmar [pictured here], Fei Sjöberg, Robert Saalman, Nils Åberg, Ingegerd Adlerberth and Agnes E. Wold, Pediatrics, epub May 6, 2013. The authors, at Queen Silvia Children’s Hospital, Sahlgrenska University Hospital, […]