WHY THERE’S NO CLEAN WAY TO PEEL AN ORANGE

You’re likely to get juice on your hands

What squirts oil a thousand times faster than a space shuttle launching? We’ll give you one juicy clue…

WHICH ACCELERATES faster: a NASA rocket blasting off the launch pad or citrus oil squirting out of a schoolboy’s orange as he peels his morning snack?

The answer, according to high-speed footage shot by US researchers, is the oil. By analysing oranges being squeezed close up, they found that the fruit is capable of ejecting oil at up to 36 km per hour over one millimetre, accelerating from a full stop to top speed 1000 times faster than a launching space shuttle. And it’s all thanks to those countless little pockmarks that dot your orange peel (unlike juice, fruit oils live primarily in seeds or rinds).

Those tiny dimples on citrus fruits are oil glands, where the essential orange, lemon and lime oils that inevitably get spritzed all over your hands

are synthesised. Thousands of them lie beneath the surface of the rind.

When you peel a citrus fruit, the rind bends, compressing the oil glands and building pressure like bubble wrap does beneath a jabbing finger. When the glands burst, jets of oil blast out of the rind at more than ten metres per second – faster than a flying bumblebee or a falling raindrop.

Researchers hope that a greater understanding of how these erupting oil glands achieve such swift acceleration could inspire new medical technology, such as asthma inhalers loaded with exploding pouches of medicine. So take heart the next time you’re cursing the citrus oil on your hands: that fruit might save a life – once scientists learn to make medicine travel at the speed of lime.