#WHIZ KIDS FREE#
Infections caused by catheters can be deadly, but they’re notoriously difficult to prevent because once a catheter is in place, it’s hard to keep it sterile and free of infections caused by bacteria… or at least it used to be.Īfter researching different ways to fight infection, Rhodes and his classmates developed a catheter that can be sterilized in vivo (while it’s still inside the patient’s body), using nothing more than light. They’re responsible for 40 percent of all hospital-acquired infections, including four million urinary tract infections each year. WHIZ KIDS: Nate Rhodes, James Allen, Mitch Barneck, Martin de La Presa, and Ahrash Poursaid, bioengineering students at the University of UtahĬONTRIBUTION TO HUMANITY: Finding a way to prevent the most common- and dangerous- hospital-acquired infectionsĭETAILS: Rhodes’s aunt works as a primary care nurse, and she taught him more than he probably ever wanted to know about infections caused by catheters, the tubes that are used to drain urine and other fluids from the body. Aiming for the water at the bottom of the urinal or toilet bowl (even if it’s being flushed) will only increase the amount of splash. That helps contain any splash-back within the urinal, reducing the amount sprayed back toward you by as much as 90 percent. Aim sideways, down, or both and try to reduce the angle of attack to less than 30 °. If the stream strikes the back of the urinal at a 90 ° angle, the droplets will splash back the same way they came- toward you. Aim for the back wall of the urinal but not straight on. The Splash Lab researchers found that standing 15 inches back from the urinal sprayed droplets over a 150-square-inch area, but standing five inches away reduced the spray to almost nothing. And since the Plateau-Rayleigh instability comes into effect six inches after the stream leaves your body, you want to close the gap to less than six inches. You want to stand close enough to the urinal to allow your stream to remain a stream. (If a second drop struck the same spot, it made the hole even deeper.) When the hole collapsed a fraction of a second later, it created its own splash, adding to the size and volume of the splash-back. When the droplets splashed into water, such as that pooled at the bottom of a urinal, the impact created a momentary cavity or “hole” in the surface of the water.The researchers found that their stream broke into droplets six inches after exiting the simulated urethra, and those droplets created more splashback than that of a single unbroken stream. One of the main culprits in creating splash-back is a phenomenon known as the Plateau-Rayleigh instability- the tendency of a stream of liquid to break into droplets after traveling a short distance.They placed sheets of white paper below the fake urinal to show how much liquid splashed out and where. They aimed the device at an improvised “urinal-like environment” and let it flow, filming the results with a high-speed camera. Using a 3-D printer, the team created a simulated urethra (the duct by which urine leaves the body), then rigged some equipment to squirt a stream of blue-dyed water through it at a rate of 21 ml (about 1 ½ tablespoons) per second, the pressure and flow rate of a healthy adult male.
But late one night in 2012, while driving back from a conference in San Diego (a 700-mile trip that must have included plenty of pit stops), Hurd and Truscott came up with the idea of using the lab to study another kind of fluid dynamics. Because they receive a lot of funding from the Office of Naval Research, they usually study water. (For anyone who’s never used a urinal, splash-back is exactly what it sounds like: when you pee into a urinal, some droplets hit the back wall and splash back onto the floor… or onto your pants.)ĭETAILS: BYU’s Splash Lab studies the physical properties of liquids in motion, an area of physics known as fluid dynamics. WHIZ KIDS: Randy Hurd, Kip Hacking, Benjamin Haymore, and Tad Truscott, four physicists at Brigham Young University’s “Splash Lab”ĬONTRIBUTION TO HUMANITY: Studying the physics of urinal “splash-back” and devising a way to prevent it. Here at the BRI, we use it to describe folks who are not only smart- but also use their brilliance for… well, read on and see for yourself. “Whiz kid” is used to describe any exceptionally smart or successful young person. The following article is from Uncle John’s Factastic Bathroom Reader.
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