People identified by their own personal clouds of germs

Do you remember Pig-Pen, the Peanuts comic character who’s always surrounded by a cloud of his own filth? Well, it turns out that we’re actually all a little like him. Scientists have discovered that not only does everyone emit an invisible “microbial cloud,” but that individuals can be recognized by the bacteria that make up their particular cloud.

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Who was the cartoon character, I think he was called Pig Pen, in one of the American publications

• Who was the cartoon character, I think he was called Pig Pen, in one of the American publications

I’m not sure bob, I think it might have been Pig Pen.

CrazyNeutrino said:

People identified by their own personal clouds of germs

Do you remember Pig-Pen, the Peanuts comic character who’s always surrounded by a cloud of his own filth? Well, it turns out that we’re actually all a little like him. Scientists have discovered that not only does everyone emit an invisible “microbial cloud,” but that individuals can be recognized by the bacteria that make up their particular cloud.

more..

> That said, it still remains to be seen if the technique can be used in public spaces, where multiple microbial clouds are present simultaneously.

This reminds me of a story of the Australian outback. When two people meet, their individual clouds of flies merge, and when they separate so do their individual clouds of flies. It remained an open scientific question: “What fraction of the flies in the cloud of a person after the encounter were present in that person’s cloud before the encounter?”

There was a look into using smell to identify criminals for a while. I’m not sure about the success of it to date, or even if it has been implemented , but using this technology is as accurate as DNA – so the theory goes.