Great Indoors, Science Museums, Who Owns The Sky. July 10, 2020, Part 2
Science Friday
Science Friday and WNYC Studios
4.4 ⢠6.3K Ratings
šļø 10 July 2020
ā±ļø 47 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | This is Science Friday. I'm Iroplato. As you spend lots of time indoors now, do you find yourself |
| 0:06.7 | incessantly cleaning? I know I have. It's amazing, which it can turn up, right? What's even more |
| 0:14.2 | amazing is this stuff you can't see, tiny stuff like a whole microbiome that lives in your home. |
| 0:23.0 | One study of North Carolina homes found an average of 2,000 types of microbes per house, and the dust we find all over surfaces |
| 0:29.6 | and in our carpets? Well, the dust contains DNA from tens of thousands of bacteria and fungi, but there is no need to become germophobic. This is |
| 0:41.6 | completely normal and probably beneficial to our health. Author Emily Anthis talks about the |
| 0:48.4 | indoor microbiome in her new book, The Great Indoors, the surprising science of how building |
| 0:54.0 | shape our behavior, Health, and |
| 0:55.9 | Happiness. And she joins us today from Brooklyn, New York, as we used to say it when I live in |
| 1:01.1 | Brooklyn. Thank you for joining us today. Of course. Thanks so much for having me. Set the scene for |
| 1:06.2 | us. What makes up the indoor microbiome? So it is largely bacteria and a little bit of fungi, and it comes from a |
| 1:17.5 | few different sources. So in terms of bacteria, we ourselves are really the dominant sources of |
| 1:23.8 | bacteria in our homes. So listeners may know that we all have our own microbiomes. |
| 1:29.0 | These are bacteria that live in and on our bodies and are really critical to our health. |
| 1:33.7 | But as we move throughout the world, we're constantly shedding these bacteria and releasing them |
| 1:39.0 | into the air. And they then settle, you know, in the corners of our homes, on our pillowcases, on our kitchen |
| 1:45.6 | counters. So that's a big source of microbes in our home. Our pets also introduce microbes, |
| 1:52.1 | the dogs especially. They bring in soil microbes from outside, and then they shed their own |
| 1:58.4 | microbes into the space. Then there are microbes that just drift in from outside. |
| 2:03.4 | So soil and leaves might come in through an open door or window. |
| 2:08.0 | And then there's another class of microbes that really live in and on our homes. |
| 2:13.3 | So mold is a big one. |
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