Everyone thinks hotels are icky, said Jack Gilbert, corresponding author of the study and environmental microbiologist at Argonne National Laboratory, but when one young couple we studied moved into a hotel, it was microbiologically identical to their home within 24 hours. And unpublished further research reveals that the time frame is even swifter than that. No matter what you do to clean a hotel room, Gilbert said, your microbial signal has wiped out basically every trace of the previous resident within hours. Whats more, the researchers were able to determine how much individuals in a family interacted, what rooms they used, and even when theyd last been to one part of the house or another. This has obvious applications in forensic science. We could go all J. Edgar Hoover on this and make a database of microbial fingerprints of people all over the world, Gilbert said, and its far more sophisticated than a standard fingerprint, which is just a presence or absence indication. We can see who they are, where theyre from, the diet theyre eating, when they left, who they may have been interacting with. It gets pretty crazy.
Posted on: Tue, 02 Sep 2014 10:54:23 +0000