In today's fast-paced life, most people don't make pasta at home very often.

But...does "playing with dough" seem like one of the best games to play with your baby? After all, many people think it's both fun and safe.

However, if "playing with dough" gets elevated to "playing with flour," then beware!

A sudden explosion occurred at 1:00 a.m. on Nov. 22, 2018, in the student dormitory of the Hong Kong Baptist University, resulting in injuries to 12 students, including four males and eight females, involving burns to their hands, feet and faces. According to the fire investigation, the incident originated when some people threw flour at each other during the "birthday celebration" and the candles were not extinguished, leading to the explosion.

White flour may look soft and lovely, but it's actually quite powerful. Not only does it make a delicious cake, but it can also be an explosive and destructive "dust bomb"!

What is a dust explosion?

Any solid substance in the form of a fine powder is called dust. Dust has a very large ratio of surface area to mass. Combustion occurs conditionally, only on solid or liquid surfaces in contact with oxygen. This causes dust to be more flammable than bulk materials.

For example, a kilogram of spherical material has a density of 1 gram per cubic centimeter, a diameter of 12.4 centimeters, and a surface area of 0.048 square meters. However, if it breaks down into spherical dust particles with a diameter of 50 microns (about the size of a flour particle), at which point the surface area is 120 square meters, the rate of combustion of the substance will increase dramatically.

Dust that can burn and explode is called combustible dust. For example, in order to flour, cornstarch, milk powder, powdered sugar, chocolate powder, pollen and so on as the representative of the organic dust. Inorganic dusts represented by magnesium powder, aluminum powder, and mineral powders (such as coal and sulfur) are active members of the dust family.

If these combustible dusts are suspended in the air at the right concentration, they form dust clouds. Although they are small in size, this group is powerful and only needs a certain concentration, oxygen and an ignition source to explode into a small universe.