It’s death, Jim but not as we know it!

QUESTION Would death be instant in the near vacuum of space?

With no air, extreme cold and almost zero pressure, you wouldn’t last long, but death would not be instantaneous.

it would take around ten to 15 seconds for your body to use up the oxygen reserves from your bloodstream, and the lack of oxygen to your brain would render you unconscious.

holding your breath wouldn’t help: a rapid loss of external pressure would cause the gas inside your lungs to expand, rupturing them and releasing air into the circulatory system.

Nasa concludes you might stay alive for up to four minutes, but you would need to be rescued within 90 seconds to have a chance of a full recovery.

Your skin and the tissue underneath would swell as the water in your body vaporises in the absence of atmospheric pressure, and you would bloat to twice your normal size, though your skin is elastic enough to prevent rupture.

You’d be in immense pain and circulation would be impeded, but you would not immediately freeze — the lack of gaseous molecules in the near vacuum of space means there would be negligible heat loss from your body.

Exposed directly to unfiltered cosmic radiation, you would be sunburned and probably get decompression sickness.

Thomas Davids, Kidderminster, Worcs.

QUESTION What sounds common in other languages are not used by English speakers?

FURTHER to previous answers, a sound common in Swedish (represented by sj or sk) is produced by blowing through pursed lips. While the long vowel

u is somewhere between oo (as in ‘soon’) and German ü.

these two sounds occur in sju, the word for ‘seven’, which approximates to the English word ‘phew’. Rick Taylor, Witney, Oxon.