Yesterday we had the opportunity to take and plate two swabs from the environment. I wanted to see if people reading Nature: Immunology or Nature: Biotechnology had transferred more bacteria to the pages of the magazing.

I swabbed the lower right hand corner of each magazine, and not surprisingly, the Biotechnology magazine grew more bacteria. Should we assume that the Immunology readership just washes its hands more, or that a lot more people read Biotechnology.

More research is needed, but it was a good start. In the future might a library tag or order its holdings based on how much bacteria is on the cover? Real time, RFID enabled bacteria counts on the cover of books would measure might tell prospective borrowers something about the popularity of the item, or whether or not that Life Magazine large-format photography book really does get taken into the bathroom as much as you think it does. Who knows what other insane profiling through the data-mining of bacterial information an overzealous intelligence agency could get their hands on? (Probably not much to be honest, given the bluntness of this measurement...but its worth asking).