WHY DO PAPER CUTS HURT SO MUCH

As far as injuries go, paper cuts look pretty harmless, but there’s no denying the fact that they can feel disproportionately agonising.

And when you look at what's going on at a scientific level, paper cuts are surprisingly brutal, as Ferris Jabr explains in the episode of Scientific American’s Instant Egghead below.

For starters, the fact that we’re most likely to experience paper cuts on our nerve-coated fingertips makes the potential for pain pretty high from the start. 

Our fingers are covered with plenty of neurons, including nociceptors, which are there to detect any potential harm, such as from harsh chemicals, high temperatures and also pressure that might break the skin, as Jabr explains.

Any of these feelings will trigger electrical and chemical signals that make the brain painfully aware of an injury, and this tell us to stop doing whatever it is we’re doing.

But a paper cut doesn’t just cause the pain of a regular cut. Although it may look like a pretty clean incision, if you look at paper under a microscope it’s actually a nightmarishly jagged surface that rips apart our cells and nerve endings.

“The piece of paper cuts through skin more like a small saw than a knife,” Jabr explains. “As if that wasn’t horrible enough, paper leaves behind chemical particles, irritating the wound."

Because paper cuts are so shallow, they actually don’t bleed or clot very much, which leaves all your tissue and nerves exposed. Ouch.

Plus, there’s also the psychological pain, which comes from knowing that we can be injured so badly by something as small and innocuous as paper. We made you paper, why do you have to be so mean?





SOURCE

ENGLISH 101: WHEN TO DOUBLE CONSONANT

Is it dialled or dialed?

When adding -ing and -ed to verbs, we sometimes double the consonant beforehand. People are often confused with ‘dialled/dialed’, ‘benefitted/benefited’, ‘focussed/focused’ and ‘targetted/targeted’. This tip answers some of those queries.

The official requirements are that we ‘double a single consonant letter at the end of any base where the preceding vowel is spelled with a single letter and stressed’.

What does this mean in practice?

Examples:

word	present participle	past participle
bar	barring	barred
beg	begging	begged
occur	occurring	occurred
permit	permitting	permitted
patrol	patrolling	patrolled

It is true to say that there is usually no doubling when the preceding vowel is unstressed (‘enter’ becomes ‘entering/entered’; ‘visit’ becomes ‘visiting/visited’) or when the preceding vowel is written with two letters (‘tread’ becomes ‘treading/treaded’).

Dial

With ‘dial’, even though the preceding vowel is written with two letters (so you would think that there would be no doubling), it becomes ‘dialling/dialled’ (though not in American English, as mentioned).

Some words change their spelling to cope (they add a letter ‘k’).

word	present participle	past participle
panic	panicking	panicked
traffic	trafficking	trafficked
frolic	frolicking	frolicked
bivouac	bivouacking	bivouacked

What about ‘focus’?

This word can take either double or single s, with the single option being highly preferred.

word	present participle	past participle
focus	focusing/focussing	focused/focussed

Here’s an odd one to end:

American	British English
parallel	parallel
paralleling	parallelling
paralleled	parallelled

Example:

The vetting service from Future Perfect is unparallelled.