I Guess It Means ... You Stink

Scientists with waay too much time on their hands and waay too little grant money have allegedly discovered a new forensic technique to identify people. And of course submit new grant research applications.

Every human on earth has a cloud of germs surrounding them at all times - and it is almost as distinct to that person as a fingerprint.

The "microbial cloud" contains millions of bugs that are put out from various pores and points in our bodies.

According to experts, the cloud hangs around a person's body at all times and each individual cloud has a signature that could be read by carrying out genetic analysis of the bacteria.

Scientists were able to identify individuals from a group of volunteers just by sampling germs from the air around them.

The noxious nimbus consists of combinations of microbes emitted from our bodies that vary from person to person.

More here.

Oh No!

Is that a flagella in your pocket or are you just glad to see me?

To those of you who strike out more often than not with the opposite sex, here's some disturbing news. Scientists have discovered that even germs have better sex lives than you.

In the past, many disease-causing protozoa were thought to reproduce by splitting in half with no genetic exchange, which is the common way that most microbes reproduce. But new results show they also use sex to swap genes between strains. Research into the sex lives of pathogens helps scientists understand how new strains of disease-causing microbes arise.

In the case of disease-causing pathogens, like the yeast Candida or the malaria parasite Plasmodium, sex can lead to several harmful genes being combined in one new daughter cell. For example, it is through sex that genes for drug resistance can spread among different pathogen strains faster than it would through asexual methods. Mixing up the genes may also give rise to new pathogen strains that the human population has less resistance to.

Story here.