Giz Explains: Where Dust Bunnies Come From [Dust]

I first met my terrible dust bunny, cowering under a soon-to-be replaced video card. It was 2003. Since then, he has puffed around in my periphery, a dusty daemon on my figurative shoulder. And in my literal apartments.

I threw him out with the fritzy Radeon, and vowed to properly clean my computer case from then on. So he migrated.

From the left rear corner of my gaming computer, he hitched to the corner of my college dorm, behind the TV and out of sight. In my first apartment, he grew bolder and more proudly disgusting; I caught him twice next to the lavatory door. In apartments with strict cleaning rotas, he went into hiding, but could usually find the foot of a bedpost, or a closet corner, or a heavy appliance to hide near. Just last month, I found him in the course of the hall, sitting static at the hardwood nexus of filth. It wasn’t clear if he’d come from a bedroom, from underneath the nearby fridge, or if he’d rolled several more feet, tumbleweed-style, from the rest room. Didn’t matter. He was back, he was gross, and nearly a decade later, I still had no idea where he had come from, or how he had formed.

What is Dust?

Let’s set aside the bunny for a second, and specialise in the filth. Dust is everywhere. Fine sand is rock dust. Rubber, brakepad and pavement particles are road dust. Fine ash could be volcanic dust. Hell, Carl Sagan famously and repeatedly observed Earth as a ” mote of dust,” albeit in a cosmic sense. But the dust we’re talking about, dust bunny dust, is a thing, with a selected recipe. And a studied one! In step with David W. Layton and Paloma I. Beamer, who coauthored a report called ‘Migration of Contaminated Soil and Airborne Particulates to Indoor Dust,’ typical household dust in a midwestern home is comprised of the subsequent :

Indoor dust is a mix of soil tracked into a residence, particulate matter derived from ambient outdoor air, and importantly, organic matter inputs from various sources. A prominent feature of indoor dust is its organic material content, with levels of about 40 wt % in residential housing.

Soil, pollen, and airborne dirt particles were to be expected, and account for over half of dust’s weight. Is smart! Outside is stuffed with dirt, and anytime we return to our homes, we bring some of that back.

So, Drs Layton and Beamer, what about that other 40%. The ” organic matter,” as you call it:

lint, skin particles, organic fibers, food debris, etc.

That other 40% is you: your food, your skin, your hair, and your clothes’ lint. Or even your dog’s! But mostly just yours, you disgusting, shedding beast.

The closer you look, the more serious it gets. For a feature in a 1986 issue of Discover Magazine (via the Straight Dish ), Penny Moser took samples of dust from her home to a lab, where she took a have a look at a number of them through a microscope:

Pathologist Charles McLeod moved his eye over the prepared slide containing my dust ball… ” Here`s section of an insect,” he said, ” either a chitinous shield or a body fragment. Here’s a human hair.” It was mine. I may tell because I periodically give myself a henna rinse, and under the microscope the hair showed bursts of Raging Raspberry or Autumn Copper slapped onto mouse brown.

We stumbled on an Alternaria mold spore, which appeared like a segmented sweet potato, and a roundworm egg, which I didn’t need to know a lot more about. On this slide, as on the entire slides, there were many tiny blue and pink fibers. ” They’re natural fibers,” McLeod said. ” You may tell by the flat, irregular shape. On your neighbor’s radiator dust we now have an artificial blue fiber. Probably from something like a pair of blue pantyhose.” The radiator dust also had a ghastly looking thing that resembled chicken feet, but was just a tiny hair cluster from the bottom of a leaf. From under the stove we found boric-acid crystals – a cockroach prophylactic – and some yeast. There were also cat hairs, pollen and more pink and blue fibers.

Insect parts, hair, mold, worm eggs, unidentifiable fibers, pantyhose thread, leaf hair, yeast and roach poison. And that was the least worrying of the samples. From under her bed:

The tiny toenail fragment didn`t bother me and the mildew spores I may live with – but not the horrible hairy thing that seemed like a lobster claw. ” That’s the limb of something that’s been dismembered,” McLeod said matter-of-factly. It wasn’t a minute before he found an entire one. ” I’ve never seen anything quite like this,” he said. ” It kind of feels to have mouth parts on its feet and gill-like devices.” It was to me, definitely, the ugliest thing I had ever seen. It appeared like an angry rhinoceros with crustacean appendages.

This turned out to be a dirt mite, a very common, invisible-to-the-naked-eye creature that lives in most of our homes, feeding off the outside that we constantly shed.

Every this sort of ingredients, however, is dead. Whether it’s an insect corpse, a disembodied hair, or flakes of epidermis, it’s all dead. Dead dust has no will, no intentions. So why does it clump as if it does?

The origin of dust bunnies, the universe, and everything

Dust is solely dust. It’s not readily evident why little tiny particles of some thing or another would clump together, and even less obvious how these kind of flecks and specks and grains come to behave in seemingly consistent ways: forming in corners, or edges; appearing in clusters; preferring life indoors rather than out. Albeit a crude and basic one, dust bunnies are a system, and systems must emerge from somewhere, by some mechanism.

Make that mechanisms, plural. Dust begins to bunnify by doing what dust does best: settling. But because dust is made up of so many alternative materials, it settles in a whole lot other ways. Hair, large skin scales and visible dirt are positioned mostly by predictable forces, like air from a vent (particles may settle within the small eddie, or vortex, near a vent opening) or my physical movement (that is why dust bunnies often appear behind doors-they’ve been swept there). Smaller particles are likely to remain airborne for long periods of time, dropping at rates of just a foot an hour for sub-micron dust particles.

These smaller particles could be brought about surprising locales, propelled by unnoticeable, super-subtle airflows. As still as your home’s atmosphere may feel, it’s in constant movement. Your breathing, your appliance’s exhaust, and your heating and cooling systems are sources of flow, the direction and patterns of that are rarely observed, except during the dust bunnies they help create.

But airflows and walking paths and so on can only tell us where dust bunnies shall be; they don’t tell us why they form. For that, we turn to cosmology.

A popular theory in regards to the formation of our solar system, and others, for that matter, is that a few of the early bodies of the galaxy just variety of…clumped up. Says Richard Cowen , in his book, ‘History of Life’:

Dust particles collide softly and are likely to stick together by electrostatic and gravitational attraction in a process called accretion. Around a new star, the dust bunnies can increase and compact into substantial solid masses a kilometer or so in diameter. Computer models show that in exactly a number of million years, several thousand bodies the scale of huge asteroids will coalesce into larger units that we now see as planets.

This same principle is often applicable to household dust, says Cowen, whose theory is echoed by astrophysicist luminary Neil deGrasse Tyson: ” [Accretion] explains the origin of dust bunnies under your couch.”

With much respect for our astrophysical inclined friends, within the gravity-bound context of a home, the tiny amounts of static electricity present in motes of dust are only useful for explaining why fine particles stick together. It takes an improved bond to hold a type of mouse-like nests of refuse together. Baylor University physics professor Lorin Matthews told Esquire last year, ” The forces that hold the dust bunnies together might possibly be the entangled fibers themselves. They get matted, similar to lint or felt.”

Once all those larger skin, hair and insect particles meet, in other words, they only get their hooks into one another, and don’t let go. This could seem unlikely from our macro, human perspective, but a leaf through even a low-power microscope will show the constituent parts of a common dust bunny to be much gnarlier, and therefore so much more susceptible to snarling to at least one another, than they seem from Up Here.

There are other minor culprits, like the cooking of fatty foods, which produces triglycerides that could attach to dust particles , making them stickier. Your complete causes, though, share one characteristic: they’re subtle. It’s either electrostatic forces which might be nearly impossible to measure, or airflows which are impossible to feel, or fat deposits which can be an unavoidable and unnoticeable byproduct of preparing basically any delicious food.

Actually, make that two characteristics: without dust, they will’t exist. So get cleaning.

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This post is tagged: airborne particulates, contaminated soil, gaming computer, particulate matter, typical household