Robot Baby Shows How Crawling On Carpet Creates Cloud Of Filth

Robot Baby Shows How Crawling On Carpet Creates Cloud Of Filth

Bruce Y. Lee , CONTRIBUTOR Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

Babies crawling on carpets can stir up trouble.

What's the difference between a Monster Truck and a baby? Monster trucks don't wear diapers. Otherwise, put a Monster Truck on a dirt path and a baby on a carpet, and both will stir up a cloud of dirt, filth, microorganisms, and other substances as they move. Isn't that cute?

Next time you accuse infants of not doing any work, remember the study recently published in theEnvironmental Science & Technology. For the study, a team of researchers from Purdue University (Tianren Wu and Brandon E. Boor) and Finland (Martin Täubel, Rauno Holopainen, Anna-Kaisa Viitanen, Sinikka Vainiotalo, Timo Tuomi, Jorma Keskinen, Anne Hyvärinen, Kaarle Hämeri, and Sampo E. Saari) created a foil-wrapped, legless, crawling baby robot, which doesn't look disturbing in this video at all:

Imagining this robot crawling towards you relentlessly in the dark should in no way be haunting. The team then had this robot crawl across samples of rugs and then detected the gunk (that's a scientific term) that the baby's movements flung into the air for the baby and everyone around the baby to potentially inhale. Here's a video describing the findings:

The conclusion: toddlers are doing work, spreading much more than cheer around. They are dirty (not necessarily in a moralistic sense), they crawl on dirty surfaces, they create clouds of dirty things around them, and they inhale dirty stuff. When moving around, babies may spread more bacteria, fungi, particulate matter, and other gunk around than adults since most adults don't crawl around as much on carpets (when they are sober).

Does this mean that you should replace all of your carpeting with linoleum or put your toddler in a little hazmat suit? Not necessarily, although a small yellow space suit could be adorable. Exposure to microbes and various substances at an early age (assuming that the baby has a normal developing immune system) can actually help train the baby's immune system. As described on the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma, and Immunology web site, early life contact with a variety of substances may reduce the risk of subsequently having allergies or asthma. Many allergies (such as food allergies increasing by about 50 percent from 1997 to 2011) have been on the rise, leading scientists to speculate whether too much hygiene is contributing to this rise.

The trick is figuring out what is good exposure and what is bad exposure and keeping your carpet clear of bad exposures. For example, are there chemicals and materials in your carpets that may harmful to infants and you? You may want to start paying closer attention to what is in and on your carpets and what things may be troubling (e.g., Julie Scelfo wrote in the New York Times about persistent organic pollutants or POPs and other toxic chemicals in carpeting) Because as this study has shown, infants could be good at stirring up any trouble.