出国留学首选一诺留学

　　You might blame your pets for shedding all over thehouse.

　　But we humans do it too—and our stuff is alive.

　　"We're constantly emitting microbes around us.

　　And this is coming from shedding of our skin, fromexhaling, our hair,we're just full of these guys."

　　Adam Altrichter, a microbial ecologist at theUniversity of Oregon.

　　"We've never been sterile organisms.

　　We are definitely masses of microbes both in and on us."

　　If you're picturing the Peanuts character Pig Pen, you may not be far off.

　　Because biologists estimate we shed a million particles an hour including, of course, a lot ofbacteria.

　　Altrichter and his colleagues wanted to measure that cloud of particles the "Pig Pen" effect, ifyou will,so they asked 11 volunteers not to shower, dressed them in shorts and tank tops, andput them in a sterile chamber for hours at a time, while collecting microbial samples on surfacesand in the air.

　　What they found in those samples was a menagerie of bacteria from the volunteers' skin, guts,genital tracts, lungs, noses and mouths.

　　And for eight of the 11 study subjects, the microbial cloud was unique enough to identify theindividual who'd left it,suggesting that this bacterial fingerprint could someday be used inforensics.

　　The study is in the journal PeerJ.

　　Given that we spend 90 percent of our lives indoors,our microbial clouds also colonize theplaces we live and work,and, yes, the people around us.

　　"And so it's just kind of interesting to think about how the people that we interact with at work,or in classrooms, or in other environments,how we could be sharing some of these microbialpassengers between us, not even knowing anything about it."

　　And now that you do know about it—hopefully your view of your coworkers won'tbecome…clouded.