Swab 1604784 219059299 2008-06-13T11:25:40Z 71.205.109.95 {{wiktionary}} *In [[medicine]], a '''[[cotton swab]]''' is a small piece of material, such as [[gauze]] or [[cotton]], which is used to clean [[wound]]s, apply medications, or retrieve samples of body fluids such as [[blood]] or [[mucus]]. Swabs may be attached to stiff wires or sticks to aid access. Swabbing is useful as a [[noninvasive]] technique which is easily mastered. It's also used when dealing with [[bacteria]]. *Swabs are also used for cleaning and/or testing in other fields, such as the [[dyne test]] of the [[surface energy]] of plastics. It has been found that swabs made by different manufacturers can give different results, because different substances are used to bind the material to the stick [http://pffc-online.com/mag/paper_taking_measure_surface/]. *[[swab (programming)|swab]] is a function in [[C programming language]] that swaps contents of two bytes of data. {{Disambig}} [[de:Tupfer]] [[es:Swab]]