This is Scientific American's 60-second Science. I'm Karen Hopkin.You're at the supermarket trying to choose a ripe tomato when, behind you, you hear...If you're like most people, you probably hold your breath, tighten your mask and hope you don't catch whatever Patient Zero is spraying over the fresh produce.And if you're like most people, chances are you're overreacting,because a new study shows that we're not very skilled when it comes to diagnosing infectiousness based on the sound of a sneeze or cough.The work is in the Proceedings of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences.Previous studies have shown that folks can tell when someone is sick based on how they look or, in some cases, how they smell.So it's only natural to wonder whether the same would hold true for an assessment with our ears.So researchers asked volunteers to listen to audio clips of people hacking and sneezing."Half of the coughs and sneezes were produced by someone with an infectious illness, like the flu or the common cold.And half were produced by benign causes like eating too much cinnamon all at once or sticking a Q-tip up their noses."Nicholas Michalak, a grad student in social psychology at the University of Michigan."We clipped these sounds from YouTube videos in which people told their audience that they were sick.Many reported having been diagnosed by a medical professional.All this said, we could not directly confirm whether people in our sound clips were infectious or not."
