Dust Balls, All the Real Dirt on Dust

David Scharf

Discover Magazine

We spend our whole lives fighting dust, and yet, when it gets into a big clump, we think of it as a little creature. We elevate it to cute animal status by calling it a dust kitten or a dust bunny. There's twice as much dust inside your house as there is in the air outside. And you won't believe what lives in the dust balls under your bed-to every ounce of dust there are 42,000 mites eating the 50 million skin scales our bodies shed every day. Hand-colored scanning electron micrograph of a dust mite hunting for a skin scale dinner, magnified 447 times.

David Scharf, "Dust Balls, All the Real Dirt on Dust," in POYi Archive, Item #15232, http://archive.poy.org/items/show/15232 (accessed November 23, 2024).