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What are dust bunnies made of, and where did they come from? Part 1
A two-part investigation into recent advances in dustbunnyology 22 February 2023
Part 1 - what are dust bunnies made of?
22 February 2023
Tease apart a dust bunny and with a magnifying glass you’ll find body hairs, skin cells, laundry fluff, bedsheet fibres and old knicker threads.
A fine example of the variegated domestic dust bunny
Eyeballing a dust bunny with optical instruments will only you get so far.
To get a much, much closer look you’ll need an electron microscope.
(Fortunately for keen home dustbunnyologists used desktop electron microscopes are available at a very reasonable $60k - $100k.)
The Hitachi TM 3030 Plus is ideal for all your electron microscopy needs
So what does a closer look at a dust bunny's innards reveal?
40x magnification reveals a jumble of material which at first glance closely resembles a horse's nest with bad dandruff.
At 100x magnification you can start to make out bits of pollen, the texture of hair, skin cells and the other tiny components of domestic detritus such as the bodies of dust mites.
100 x magnification
At 300x magnification there's a big fat pollen particle in the middle and, in all probability, sloughed off skin cells and bits of decaying underwear fibres.
300 x magnification
But there's also something smaller yet clinging to the shafts of hair... at 600 x magnification, we see that even dust bunnies are dusty.
600 x magnification - oh look, a thing!
It's dusty all the way down. To paraphrase Augustus De Morgan;
Wee DBs have littler DB’s
Upon their backs to bite 'em,
And littler DBs have lesser DBs,
And so, ad infinitum.
Nano, nano to you too. Things get smaller from here on
I'd like to say no dust bunnies were hurt for the following section - but actually they were blasted to smithereens
Warning; the following section contains graphic material.
Not suitable for the graph-sensitive.
You'll definitely want a Bruker 800 nuclear magnetic resonance thingy. Don't get the 700.
Dust bunnies have good reasons to abhor vacuums and here's another.
This is a nuclear magnetic resonance spectrograph.
You'll need one of these because we're in the realm of the nanometer now - the really tiny. In fact, tiny to the power of 10-9 of a meter.
A sample of dust bunny is vapourized and the bits are injected into a hard vacuum.
Story of a dust bunnies life really.
This machine does high-energy physics at bits of dust bunny to measure what they're made of.
Sadly there's nothing to feast your eyes on.
This is what you get for your $5,000,000 nmr - a graph.
Created by the University of Ottawa's Department of Mucking About With An NMR, bless 'em.
The top trace is the 13C CPMAS NMR spectrum of a sample of dust bunny.
The middle trace is a spectrum of clothing fibers from dryer lint.
The difference spectrum (the bottom trace) is consistent with a complex mixture of proteins and largely represents the spectrum of dead human skin and the bodies of dust mites.
So the spectrograph does tell you there are lots of bio-bits in a dust bunny (especially the bathroom dust bunnies) so it does have a fairly high Yuck factor (0.85 Gags on the Ick/Yew scale).
This is the ultimate dust bunny probe - the Atlas Detector at Large Hadron Collider.
See hooman for scale, bottom centre
Once again, it's into the vacuum with the dust bunny bits.
To protect the sensitive nature of the public from the true horrors of high-energy dust bunny experiments, CERN scientists say they're using non-dust bunny-derived protons.
Or they claim they're using re-cycled vegan protons if the veggy casserole was on at the canteen the day before.
Man races dust bunny protons hurrying along a particle accelerator at almost the speed of light
The detector tracks all the shrapnel and sparks from the head-on proton-on-proton collisions.
For this kind of Big Science infrastructure you'd expect a better class of graph - and you wouldn't be disappointed.
LHC gives good graph.
Graphs in 3-D no less! Reveals the fractal nature of dust bunny fluffiness down to the smallest scales.
No-one will ever actually see anything though.
Dust bunnyologists can only ever sift out evidence of a dust bunny's fundamental constituents from the cataract of data captured by the hardware.
Somewhere in the data there's a tiny fleeting presence written in mathematics on the shimmering fabric of reality, the warp and weft of the universe.
Twiddle the knobs right and you get a graph of the above that sets a dust bunnyologists heart a-thumpin'.
Is that not impressive? Data from 600 million collisions a second is sifted and filtered through a huge dedicated network of computers to be measured, analysed and statistically assessed and you get this 128k jpeg for your troubles.
Behold a pentaquark’s signature. Which makes one wonder about pentadustbunnies, does it not? (No, not really. A Scientist replies.)
So having found out what a dust bunny is made of the next question is; Where did those dust bunny quarks come from?
When did the first dust bunnies form?
That's what we'll investigate in Part 2 of What are dust bunnies and where did they come from?
