Wriggling straw wrappers
You shouldn't play with your food, apparently. But no one said anything about straws, so try this. A drop of water turns a paper straw wrapper into a hyperactive, wriggling worm.
1. You'll need a drinking straw wrapped in paper. (Cafés, juice bars and cinemas provide these.) Squash the ends of the wrapper together to form a tightly compressed wad of paper. Now pull the wrapper from the straw and pop the wad on a plate or saucer.
2. Dip the straw deep into your drink and cover the end to trap the liquid inside. Keep the straw sealed with your finger and move it over to the wrapper.
3. Partially remove your finger so that a small amount of water pours out of the straw and onto the wrapper. The wrapper will start wriggling like a hyperactive worm.
4. The wrapper will wriggle quickly for the first few seconds before running out of puff. Add a bit more water if it stops completely.
What's going on?
Water is drawn into the tiny nooks and crannies between the fibres in paper by capillary action. As water enters these spaces, it makes the paper swell which in turn, makes any tight folds tend to open again.
Squashing the wrapper on your plastic straw creases it back and forth into a tight and compact wad of paper.
A large drop of water is enough to completely soak the wrapper which wriggles and expands like a worm when all those folds open. The Magic Flower trick works exactly the same way. If you can't find a straw wrapped in paper, you can always make some petals blossom instead.
Now, if you think individually wrapping straws is taking hygiene a bit too far (like I did until recently), then spend a few minutes in a busy café. Watching countless fingers fumbling around in the straw jar might change your mind. It certainly made me wonder how recently those hands might have covered a sneeze or cough, or when they last saw a bar of soap. Individually wrapped straws suddenly seem a little less over the top now, don't they?
Nobody likes the sore throat, coughs, sweats and runny nose you get when a cold virus hijacks your DNA just to make endless copies of itself. But if you're still scoffing at the idea of individually wrapped straws, perhaps some simple mathematics will convince you that a little extra hygiene can go a very long way.
Fifteen years ago, CSIRO researchers estimated that influenza was responsible for one-and-a-half million days off work per year. The average Aussie salary is around $1200 per week, which is roughly $240 per day. Plug these numbers into a calculator and you get:
$240 x 1,500,000 days = $360,000,000
That's $360 million down the gurgler per year thanks to one pesky little virus!
The CSIRO report also included the cost of all the associated doctor's consultations, medicines and even deaths, and estimated that the total cost of influenza is more like $600 million per year. With those figures, it's hard to argue against any simple, low-cost improvement to basic hygiene, isn't it?
So I say 'hoorah' for individually wrapped straws and 'yippy' for the wriggly worms you can make every time you use one.
Published 15 December 2010