Slice of Life

You know what the worst book ever was? It was the old World Book Encylopedia!

Not in terms of content, certainly not. That old multivolume information compendium got me through many a report in elementary school ("Why The Sun Promotes Growth On Earth"), junior high ("The Sights and Sounds of Sunny Seville") and high school ("Journalism Careers - Our Link To Our Future"), and the surest way to tell that old Mark had been hitting the blue books was the evidence of a thousand paper cuts on my fingers. 

The World Book was printed on the thinnest, sharpest-edged paper known to man, and just thumbing through its fact-filled pages was an adventure in lacerations. 

 

After all these years and all those band-aids, I decided to look into the matter of why the better paper was the most likely to cut skin open. After all, no one ever suffered from reading the New York POST, unless they took its contents seriously. 

Science to the rescue, with the explanation that paper that's too thin will curl up before it even has the chance to slice your index finger, and thick paper won't pierce the skin. It's like when a knife is dull and unable to push force on the skin.

But physicist Kaare Jensen and her team went to work on this vital topic and they found that paper 65 micrometers thick is just right to slit the leather.

If you used to have one of those dot matrix printers (or if you ever dated Ms Dot Matrix from Poughkeepsie), well, that was the deadliest sort of paper. Magazines come in second, now that the space in family libraries where once encyclopedias dwelled is filled with dusty Wii devices and exploding Gameboys.

So, armed with this information, the researchers looked for something useful to do with it, and they have designed a 3-D printed tool they're calling  the Papermachete. Just put a strip of that printer paper into it, and you have a single-use knife to shop and slice fruits and veggies and meat and cheese.

Of course, you have to change the paper strip often...

Ms Jensen, of the Technical University of Denmark in Kongens Lyngby, says her team is always looking to experiment with these new types of cutting technology, but ... “Ideally you would want some test subjects, but it’s hard to find volunteers.”

I'm sure they printed their research paper, but if you get a copy, please handle it very carefully!