A cure for cancer would be good. A rocket ship that can travel from an unhealthy planet to an unpolluted one would be nice too.
And why not a special psychic ray gun that renders psychopathic warmongers as helpless and charming as babies?
Worthy causes all.
However, it’s these sorts of problems that keep scientists too busy to solve the even bigger questions.
Such as: how much weight does my mattress put on in its lifetime?
It really is a thing
The humble mattress is a source of many mysteries. Every night, while lying in bed, we shed countless dead skin cells.
These attract millions of dust mites that climb into bed with us – where they eat our dead skin and make love. More little mites arrive, our skin keeps dropping off.
Dust in the form of mite poo and ghost skin – not to mention crumbs from late night Vegemite and toast – accumulates in the folds and crannies of the mattress.
For some people, the filth aggravates their asthma and eczema. The rest of us just mindlessly wallow.
Meanwhile, we’re also weeping moisture into our mattress. There’s sweat, bladders that run away with themselves, spilt coffee and wine, dog drool – and of course, the inevitable spillage of love.
This can lead to the bed suffering fungal and mould infections. Double yuck.
And, over time, with all this decay and mite poo and leakage, it’s true: your mattress puts on weight. But how much?
A big problem
I said that we shed countless skin cells each night. How many exactly?
It tends to range from millions to billions a day, depending on the nerds doing the counting.
Analysis by the University of California Santa Barbara came up with 500 million a day.
But a study by the Imperial College of London was built around 200 million skin cells dying and falling off an hour … or five billion a day!
So that confuses the issue.
A rough practical approach
Mattress companies love dust mites and dead skin. Because they provide a pretty good reason to change your mattress now and then.
Few mattress merchants, however, commission a building biologist to conduct a filth-analysis of discarded old mattresses picked up off the sordid streets of Sydney.
Harrison Reid, Bondil lifeguard and founder of the 10:PM mattress company, did that very thing.
“The beds we tested, we’re guessing from the filth found on them, that they’d be well over 10 years old,” said Mr Reid, in a prepared statement.
“We wanted to show people exactly what they’re sleeping on to encourage them to think about ditching that mattress they got handed down from Mum and Dad.”
That’s the pitch. What’s the evidence?
Five mattresses were picked off the streets of Sydney. Much of their dampness was presumed to be a consequence of them lying outdoors.
They were taken to a warehouse and put through a series of tests by building biologist Nicole Bijlsma.
She collected surface mould samples and conducted UV light fluid tests of a sort made popular on CSI and A Current Affair. The usual blood, semen and urine obligingly showed their dirty faces.
How much of this staining occurred before and after abandonment can’t be known.
The weight gain
Ms Bijlsma also ran debris extraction tests. These involved a vacuum cleaner with a powerhead and petri-dish trap.
It was here that the dust made of dead skin cells and mites was collected, along with other detritus that had gathered over the years.
The actual skin and mites were invisible, being so tiny.
In the end, she estimated that the dead skin and so forth accounted for about 30 per cent, on average, of the mattress’s weight.
This was based on visual observations of the mattresses, which were judged to be between 10 and 15 years old.
Best guesstimates
The simplest thing would have been to weigh the old mattresses and compared them against the weight of new mattresses of the same make. That wasn’t possible because of the accumulated moisture.
In the end, the 30 per cent figure came from calculations based on the presumed skin loss by two people over a 10 year period. This came to 5.1kg to 7.65 kg – being 25-38 per cent of the weight of a 20kg mattress (average weight).
This seems a lot. As to how the mites and their faeces and other detritus were factored in, I’m not sure . But it’s not the most outlandish guess made so far.
In 2000, the Wall Street Journal ran a piece that claimed mattresses double in size every 10 years. Wow. The experts consulted later complained that they’d been misquoted and their true opinions were ignored.
The idea remained in play for 11 years, until LiveScience killed it off: experts confessed that no one had done the necessary science.
However, it’s now widely agreed that mattress’s gain weight. By how much exactly, maybe they’ll figure it out when we’re living in a friendlier part of the universe.
