Noah Fierer and his colleagues (including Elizabeth Costello, previously in EBIO, now at Stanford) have a paper coming out in PNAS about the possibility of identifying individuals from the community of bacteria on their hands. This was in the Boulder Camera this morning, but it has already been picked up by 227 news outlets.
On the NPR interview (below) Noah says:
Noah Fierer of the University of Colorado, Boulder, studies the bacteria that live on skin.
"Our bodies are covered in bacteria," says Fierer, "but most of these are harmless, and some of them may actually be beneficial. So it's nothing to be paranoid about." In fact, there are about a hundred different kinds of bacteria that typically grow on human skin.
And that gave Fierer an idea. "We leave this trail of bacteria everywhere we go, and the idea was could we use this trail to identify who had touched a given object or surface," he says.
The reason this bacterial trail could be used to identify someone is that we differ in the kinds of bacteria we carry around. Each of us has bacterial communities that are unique to us. And bacterial communities don't change very much over time.
Paper featured in 227 news outlets (and counting) - according to Google News. Many of these explicitly mention EBIO.
Also interviews on NPR "Morning Edition"
www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124709981&ps=cprs
and the BBC.
Congratulate Noah, but maybe you don't want to shake his hand...
