If you have ever wondered why even the smallest piece of paper can cut your fingers, then you are not alone. A scientist was also troubled by the repeated cutting of fingers by paper. But he decided that he would find out the reason for this. He got success in his research, but he says that now his further research will face problems due to a small reason.
Kari Jensen, a physicist and researcher at the Technical University of Denmark, began a scientific study of this painful puzzle. New Scientist “I got a lot of paper cuts and to be honest, they started to bother me,” he told .
Jensen concluded in a cutting comment published in the journal Physical Review E that the paper posing the greatest risk was just 65 micrometres thick, much like the now little-used dot-matrix printer paper. The magazine’s paper came in second.
Jensen discovered that a particular thickness of paper and its particular angle is more effective in cutting skin. (Representative image: Canva)
The team of researchers collected different paper products such as tissues, magazines, book pages, printer paper, photos and business cards and tested them with ballistic gelatin, which is used to simulate the epidermis. The thickness and angle of cutting the skin were two key factors.
“Our initial data indicate that a successful paper cut is physically impossible outside a relatively narrow range of thicknesses for a given angle,” the researchers wrote. If too thin, the paper will bump into the skin. If too thick, it will not exert enough pressure to cut. Pressure applied straight down was less likely to cause injury than cutting at an angle.
Instead of using their research to avoid paper cuts in the future, the team’s study informed the design of a new, single-use tool called the “papermachete,” which can cut fruits, vegetables and poultry, Jensen told Science News. In the future, they hope to test the blade model on human skin, but recruiting for research can be tricky—ideally you want some test subjects, but volunteers are hard to find.
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FIRST PUBLISHED : August 6, 2024, 14:20 IST
