Health & Science

Given away by your bacteria

The skin on your hands harbors a teeming “tropical rain forest” of bacteria—about 150 different species mixed in proportions that are unique to you, says the Los Angeles Times. So when you touch something, you leave behind a microbial trace—one sufficiently distinctive, a new study indicates, to identify you as reliably as a fingerprint would. University of Colorado researchers gave computer mice to three people to use and afterward sampled the bacterial colonies left behind on the devices; they then compared what they found with a database of colonies collected from 270 other people. In every case, the mix of bacteria on the mouse closely matched that on the owner’s palm but not anyone else’s. “It suggests a new approach to forensics,” says Martin Blaser, a forensics expert at New York University who was not involved in the study. The researchers acknowledge that the technique isn’t ready for prime time; they don’t yet know how many times something must be touched to provide an identifiable trace, or how to sort out a signature if two people have touched the same surface. Still, a microbial trace can’t be simply wiped away, like a physical fingerprint, and lasts for weeks. It can also be found on surfaces, such as fabrics, on which fingerprints don’t show up.

Life in the strangest places

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

A team of NASA scientists in Antarctica recently drilled a 600-foot hole through an ice sheet and then lowered in a video camera to take a look at the dark, frigid world underneath. “We were operating on the presumption that nothing’s there,” NASA ice scientist Robert Bindschadler tells Discovery News. To their surprise, the scientists found an orange, shrimp-like amphipod and a jellyfish thriving in the supposedly uninhabitable water beneath the tons of ice. “We were just gaga” over the shrimp-like creature, Bindschadler says. “It was a shrimp you’d enjoy having on your plate.” Biologists suspect the creatures didn’t migrate from the open ocean, which lies a dozen miles from the site, but instead had evolved to live under the glacier, without light or warmth. Since the animals are relatively complex, they also suspect there must be a rich source of simpler organisms thriving there for them to feed on. The discovery has stoked the imaginations of biologists, who wonder what might be found elsewhere in the solar system. Jupiter’s icy moon Europa and Saturn’s moon Enceladus are both believed to have frozen seas.

Suffering from economic arrest

Drops in stock prices don’t hurt just your pocketbook; they may also prompt heart attacks, a new study suggests. Researchers at Duke University tracked the arrival of heart-attack patients at the campus hospital between January 2008 and July 2009, when the recession was in full swing and people were watching their savings melt away. They found that when stock prices dropped, the number of heart attacks rose; rising prices were matched by a lower incidence of heart attacks. “This is an intriguing study,” Jane Wright, of the American College of Cardiology, tells the Associated Press. “Personal stressors—in this case an economic one—can be a trigger for cardiac events.” Since heart-attack incidence rises in winter, researchers said, they can’t be sure their findings were related only to the stock market. They plan a larger study to better explore the relationship between economic and cardiac health.

The power of foreign accents

Accents speak louder than words, says Scientific American. When children are given a choice, a new Harvard study found, they focus—more than on any other factor—on how another child talks. In the study, a group of white 5-year-olds, all native English speakers, were shown pictures of other kids whom they could choose to befriend. Each image showed either a black or white face and was accompanied by a recorded voice, purportedly the potential friend’s, speaking either in English, French, or English with a French accent. Overwhelmingly, when the subjects were asked to pick a friend, they chose a native English speaker, regardless of race. Only when the “friends” were silent did race emerge as the deciding factor. The findings suggest that speech can be even more powerful than looks in determining who is accepted into social groups.

When green is mean

Going “green” may be good for the environment, but it may not make you nicer. In fact, a recent study by Canadian psychologists found that people who purchase environmentally friendly items feel “a moral glow” that makes them more likely to cheat and act selfishly in their private lives. About 90 subjects were asked to play a computer game in which they had to reward themselves with money based on results. Consumers who had recently purchased “green” products, such as “Earth-friendly” laundry soap, were more likely to lie about test results so that they could take more money. The green subjects were also six times more likely to just steal money from the envelope, the researchers found. Acting virtuously, researcher Nina Mazar tells the London Guardian, seems to make people feel they now have a “license” to act unethically and selfishly in other parts of their lives. Mazar says she tries to be green herself, but says it’s important that people “don’t feel morally superior just because they have recycled something.”