The following picture will give you the creeps, in case you were ever on the fence about the importance of washing your hands after coming in from outside. A mother has immortalized her eight-year-old son’s handprint in a petri dish.
The result is spooky, to say the least, and comes after the boy
had been playing outside.
Tasha Sturm took sterile plates and a trypticase soy agar – used to grow bacteria – to capture his handprint. All it took was a day in a dish, kept at slightly below 3 degrees Celsius, followed by several more days at room temperature. The result, which she submitted to MicrobeWorld, was an art piece bursting with color… and millions of little things that inhabit our body without us noticing.