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Life

Your personal cloud of microbes can be used to identify you

By Chris Baraniuk

8 June 2018

Âé¶¹´«Ã½. Science news and long reads from expert journalists, covering developments in science, technology, health and the environment on the website and the magazine.

Leaving traces everywhere

Andrey Popov / Getty

The sneakiest burglars slip by unnoticed, but they leave millions of their own witnesses at every crime scene. Researchers have found that it may be possible to identify criminals based on the microbes they shed from their skin or nostrils.

In 2014, at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois and his colleagues showed that . This suggested that the microbes people leave behind could be useful for identifying suspected criminals like burglars. “What if we could potentially find signatures that are…

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