THERE is indeed a cloud hanging over you: your own personal cloud of microbes. People constantly generate puffs of bacteria, even when they are sitting perfectly still. And research published in PeerJ, by James Meadow, then at the University of Oregon, and his colleagues, suggests that, like a fingerprint or a sample of DNA, these bacteria may be able to identify who someone is.
People shed bacteria—from their skin, mouths, noses and other orifices—at a rate of about 1m an hour. But until Dr Meadow’s study, no one had looked at the details. Dr Meadow therefore decided to sit volunteers down, alone, in a sterile chamber for up to four hours at a time and collect what floated off them.
The chamber in question, a white-panelled room, with a wall-high window at the front, was ventilated with filtered air that came in through a hole in its ceiling. It was scrubbed clean with disinfectant before every use. The team’s volunteers (six men and five women) dressed in new, clean, identical tank-tops and shorts, and sat for the requisite time in a disinfected plastic swivel chair at the chamber’s centre. Each was allowed a sterile laptop, to...Continue reading
Source: Science and technology http://ift.tt/1PPVDzP
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