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Holly Williams for Art-Sheep

For those of you who obsessively wash your hands fifty times a day and for those of you who don’t, here comes an interesting project that will probably make you want to run to your washrooms and give your hands quite a thorough scrubbing. Tasha Sturm, lab technician and mother of an 8-year-old has captured her son’s hand’s microflora after playing outside, in an amazing set of photographs.

Sturm, using tryptic soy agar, which is a medium for bacteria cultivation, imprinted her son’s hand and let the microorganisms grow for some days, before photographing them in their petri dish. The result: colonies of different microbes, in a variety of textures, forms, sizes and colors, shaping a child’s hand. Even though the sheer number of bacteria demonstrated in the pictures might be a shock to some, it is important to remember that, to an extent, their existence on our skin is normal and necessary for our bodies.

via boredpanda

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