{"id":238321,"date":"2026-06-04T02:30:51","date_gmt":"2026-06-04T07:30:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/06\/temperature-gaps-help-sneeze-clouds-stay-denser-and-travel-farther-experiments-show"},"modified":"2026-06-04T02:30:51","modified_gmt":"2026-06-04T07:30:51","slug":"temperature-gaps-help-sneeze-clouds-stay-denser-and-travel-farther-experiments-show","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/06\/temperature-gaps-help-sneeze-clouds-stay-denser-and-travel-farther-experiments-show","title":{"rendered":"Temperature gaps help sneeze clouds stay denser and travel farther, experiments show"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/temperature-gaps-help-sneeze-clouds-stay-denser-and-travel-farther-experiments-show.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>When a person coughs or sneezes, they expel a cloud of microscopic particles capable of carrying viruses and bacteria that act as vectors for respiratory diseases such as flu, COVID-19 or tuberculosis. Understanding how these aerosols disperse in the air is crucial for minimizing the transmission of pathogens in indoor spaces, but their dynamics are complex and depend on many factors: the force of the exhalation, the morphology of the respiratory system, the characteristics of the space, etc. Now, a new study led by researchers from the Universitat Rovira i Virgili has shown that temperature also plays an important role.<\/p>\n<p>Their findings, <a href=\"https:\/\/pubs.aip.org\/pof\/article\/38\/3\/031905\/3383035\/Bioaerosol-transport-dynamics-in-cold-and-warm\" target=\"_blank\">published<\/a> in <i>Physics of Fluids<\/i>, indicate that the difference between the temperature of exhaled air and that of the ambient air causes the cloud of particles to remain more concentrated and travel farther. The greater this difference, the more noticeable the effects are.<\/p>\n<p>The research continues a line of work initiated by the URV\u2019s ECoMMFiT research group, which developed a simulator capable of reproducing coughs and sneezes to study how respiratory aerosols disperse. As a result of that study, the team demonstrated that the nasal cavity significantly alters the trajectory of expelled particles. Now, the researchers have incorporated a new factor into the analysis: temperature.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When a person coughs or sneezes, they expel a cloud of microscopic particles capable of carrying viruses and bacteria that act as vectors for respiratory diseases such as flu, COVID-19 or tuberculosis. Understanding how these aerosols disperse in the air is crucial for minimizing the transmission of pathogens in indoor spaces, but their dynamics are [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-238321","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/238321","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=238321"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/238321\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=238321"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=238321"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=238321"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}