[科学美国人60秒] SSS 2015-09-23

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We are constantly meeting microbes around us, and this is coming from shedding our skin, from exhaling¹, and our hair, and we are just full of these guys.   Adam, a microbial ecologist at the University Of Oregon.

  We have never been sterile² organisms. We are definitely masses of microbes both in and on us.

  If you are picturing Peanut's character Pig Pen, you may not be far off, because biologists estimate we shed a million particles an hour, including of course a lot of bacteria.  OTrictorand his collegues wanted to measue that clouds of particles, The Pig Pen Effect, if you will. So they asked eleven volunteers not to shower, trust them in shorts and tenctups and put them in sterile chamber³ for hours at a time, all collecting microbial samples on surfaces and in the air. But they found those samples were ? of bacteria from the voluteers' skin, guts⁴, genital tracts⁵, lungs, noses and mouths. And for eight of the eleven study objects microbial cloud was unique enough to identify the individual who had left it, suggesting that this bacteria fingerprint⁶ could some day be used in forensics. The study is in the journal" Peer J". Given that we spend ninety percent of our life indoors, our microbial clouds also colonize⁷ the places we live and work, and yes, the people around us.

This is going to be interesting to think about how the  people that we interact with classrooms or other environments how we could be sharing these microbial passengers between us, not even knowing anything about it.

  And now you do know about it. Hopefully your view of the co-workers won't become clouded.

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