REAL LIFE NEWS: THE VOMIT BOT
by Hazed
Introducing Larry, a robot that vomits. A chunderdroid that spews like a teenager that’s drunk too many alcopops.
Why would you want to build a robot that throws up? Because it helps to study the spread of the highly infectious winter vomiting bug, norovirus.
Every year huge numbers of people fall victim to this nasty virus - it is estimated that this winter, there have been over a million cases in England and Wales. It cases sickness and diarrhoea, and is spread by contact with contaminated surfaces or objects, by contact with an infected person, or by the consumption of contaminated food or water. That’s why if one person in a family, or a workplace, gets it, it often spreads to everybody else quickly.
Scientists at the Health and Safety Lab in the UK want to know more about the way it spreads, so have built a robot that can projectile vomit on command. Its creator, Catherine Makison, describes it as a “humanoid simulated vomiting system” - and has dubbed it “Vomiting Larry”.
Larry is an anatomically correct model of the human digestive tract, and tests have shown that a single spew can carry particles over 9 feet - enough to infect an entire room with the norovirus. It takes fewer than 20 norovirus particles to infect someone, and a single drop of sick can contain as many as 2 million particles.
If you’re not already feeling queasy, Ian Goodfellow of the University of Cambridge says, “The dramatic nature of the vomiting episodes produces a lot of aerosolized vomit, much of which is invisible to the naked eye.” What’s more, the norovirus particles can remain infectious for up to 12 hours on hard surfaces - and 12 DAYS on fabric!
You can watch a video of Vomiting Larry doing his stuff at the first of the source links below.
Meanwhile, there is no cure for norovirus, so just remember to wash your hands with soap and water for at least 15 seconds after you’ve been anywhere somebody might have thrown up in!
Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/01/03/projectile_vomiting_robot/
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-20889382
