Surgeons advised to follow their instincts on sneezing

Question: It's a problem faced by baseball catchers, welders, surgeons: How do you sneeze with a mask covering your face?

Answer: Catchers and welders only have to deal with the unpleasant bounce-back, but surgeons have to worry about spraying multitudinous microbes directly into the gaping hole they've carved in a patient, says Steve Mirsky in "Scientific American" magazine.

"So how do you avoid an uh-oh following an achoo?" As reported in the "British Medical Journal," the accepted wisdom has been to sneeze while facing the sensitive area so the mask will redirect the ejecta backward and out the sides, i.e., away from the open wound. But when two plastic surgeons from a British hospital scoured the literature, they could find no actual evidence for this advice so they set out to test it, using high-speed photography and some finely ground pepper sniffed by masked volunteers.

Upshot: Very little of the blast goes sideways, though a bit sneaks out the bottom onto the surgeon's upper chest. Most of it apparently stays safely with the doctor, leaving the patient pristine. At this point, advised the Journal, "it's best for surgeons to follow their instincts when sneezing during operations."

Question: What on earth are scientists thinking creating robot cockroaches when there are already too many real ones to contend with?

Answer: The tiny robo-roaches lack legs, wings or antennae but nonetheless the wheeled machines pass muster with their real "peers," at least once the bots are scented with roach pheromones, says Elizabeth Pennisi in "Science" magazine. In fact, they're so well accepted they become part of the insects' collective decisionmaking process. And by tricking the roaches into making bad decisions, the robo-roaches are helping humans win the Battle of the Bugs.

The key is that the robots are autonomous, able to interact on their own. At first they were programmed to hang out in the darker places cockroaches prefer but then to switch to lighter areas in hopes the real ones would follow suit, hiding in more vulnerable locations. So instead of the robots "rounding up the cockroaches like sheepdogs," they work via social attraction. This is a powerful idea with many applications beyond pest control, said Massachusetts Institute of Technology robotocist Daniela Rus, possibly including the mechanical herding of livestock.

Question: How long before English language standards fall by the wayside and speakers start saying things like she "haved" a headache yesterday and he "holded" the book at arm's length as he "readed" it?