Science
Move over fingerprints: auras are real, and yours could identify you
You have an aura, except it isn’t made of purplish light; it’s your personal cloud of dead skin cells, fungus and many, many microbes. And researchers are learning to be able to identify you by it. Trillions of bacteria live on and in the human body. Together, these bacteria make up what researchers call the human microbiome. A new study out of the U.S. determined that an occupied room is microbially distinct from an unoccupied one also showed detectable differences between people’s microbial cloud “signatures,” including identifying their gender.
You know the dirty kid from ‘Peanuts’? Pig-Pen? It turns out we all look like that.
James Meadow, lead author on the study and a data scientist at Phylagen, a company in San Francisco that focuses on improving the health of the indoor microbiome in places like hospitals and homes
Understanding the interplay between the microbial cloud and environment could form the basis for attempts to better engineer ventilation systems of indoor spaces like hospitals or offices to prevent the transmission of diseases. Another potential real-world application for microbial cloud research is forensics. While it may be “years down the road,” Meadow says, our ability to distinguish between people based on their airborne microbial signatures will likely get better and better.
Just like the detectives today are dusting a room to look for fingerprints, maybe [in the future] they’ll take a big vacuum and see what microbes are there. It’s certainly not tomorrow, but it might be possible.
James Meadow
