okay next up coughing competition it's time for competitive coughing what is going on
well i've made these cutouts that look just like you and me they don't look anything like me
i always like being in the lab it's very hard work it's a very big team spend a long time putting
everything together and getting it ready and then we work for you know 10 12 hours solidly every day
and the main difficulty is Xand arguing well you can't argue on your own
but you argue with me well you start it no i i mean they're all blue
i'm the green twin everything i wear is green it's greenish oh tuck your string in man look at that i
haven't tucked in my little string didn't brush your hair you're looking quite like a total scruff pot
okay chris you ready three two one cough we're doing two experiments one where the plates are
10 centimeters away and another where they're 50 centimeters away this was really funny doing
this because you're not you would never cough in someone's face well all done not quite chris
i want you to take this agar plate and hold it in front of your face and i'm gonna cough
on it and this time i'm gonna cover my mouth with my elbow the way you're supposed to and
hopefully no germs should land on the plate okay we'll just make sure you do it properly
and now we have to wait in lab conditions bacteria take some time to grow luckily we came prepared
i'll fall asleep anywhere and when we film a little wait you know time passing and sometimes
Xand has a sleep i don't say this don't say this Xand always always falls asleep Xand has never
not fallen asleep when he's like pretend falling asleep every it's never not happened the closest
you could get to meeting me without meeting me is watching operation ouch
he's just and everyone thinks oh a funny guy pretending to be asleep for a good a good running
joke no that's just me that's who i am i'm gonna fall asleep right now he's 100 % sound asleep there
finally the test results are in so let's check out the cutouts that were 50 centimeters away first
oh yuck this has worked really well all these bacteria have grown into thick these are very
sort of juicy and getting those shots takes a long time so that's all lens change lighting
really trying to show you the detail obviously you can't see individual bacteria seeing clusters of
millions of bacteria but to show you the detail up close actually takes a huge amount of time to
get the shots of the bacteria will have taken you know the better part of an hour and we also have
to be safe with them i mean they're real bacteria they can make you sick there's a huge bacterial
splat in the middle of the plate i must have coughed off a lot of saliva with that one so this
is like coughing into someone's face when they're right next to you and that's bad news for them
when you realize that the average cough has 20 000 viruses in it which brings me to our
last result let's have a look at the plate where i covered my mouth and coughed at chris
oh two bacteria when we filmed that it would have been it would have been sort of 20 years
earlier that we were kids and we were never taught to cough in your elbows do you know what i mean
probably was 20 years wasn't it now it's 30 years yeah i guess it is a long time ago
now we've shown that not only could your cough reach the person right next to you
but it could travel a lot further than that when i watch that now
even for me it changed my behavior a bit and it also i think it's it's funny watching it
now after the pandemic how much more relevant that feels now and as well as seeing how far
they travel we've shown you just how much bacteria there can be in coughs there's a
lot more in yours than in mine chris you should see a doctor maybe i should better go find one