Carl Zimmer

And she looked into a lot of different things.

And, you know, she came to MIT and...

MIT is where Harold Edgerton built those magnificent stroboscope cameras.

And we've all seen these stroboscope images of the droplets of milk frozen in space or a bullet going through a card or things like that that he made in the 1930s and 40s and so on.

Well, one of the really famous images that was used with those cameras was a sneeze.

Actually, around 1940, that was the first time many Americans would see these droplets frozen in space.

Of course, they forgot them.

So she comes there and there's a whole center set up for this kind of high speed visualization.

And she starts playing with these cameras and she starts doing experiments with things like breathing and sneezes and so on.

But now she's using digital video and she discovers that, you know, she goes and looks at William Wells and stuff.

She's like, that's pretty good, but it's pretty simple.

It's pretty crude.

I mean, of course it is.

It was in the 1930s.

So she brings like a whole new sophistication of physics to studying these things.

She finds that, especially with a sneeze,

it sort of creates a new kind of physics.

So you actually have a cloud that just shoots forward and it even carries the bigger droplets with it.

And it doesn't just go three feet and drop it.

In her studies, looking at her video, it could go 10 feet, 20 feet.