FYI: How Forceful Is A Sneeze?
Sneeze SuperStock/Getty Images About as strong as a cough A long-standing estimate pins the velocity of a sneeze at roughly 100 meters per second, or 224 miles per hour, but that appears to be a gross exaggeration. The figure originates from a mid-century researcher named William Firth Wells, who analyzed the size of airborne droplets from a sneeze and then inferred the speed at which air must travel across a liquid surface to form them. Wells' figure has been repeated for many years but never directly tested in the lab. "I think people have been waiting for someone to come along and debunk it," says Julian Tang, a medical virologist at the Alberta Provincial Laboratory for Public Health in Edmonton. For a study published this year, Tang and his colleagues used high-speed cameras to take pictures of pepper-induced sneezes from six volunteers. The team captured each sneeze by positioning the volunteers in...