Meet the microscopic life in your home -- and on your face | Anne Madden

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4.1 • 11.9K Ratings

🗓️ 11 August 2017

⏱️ 10 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Behold the microscopic jungle in and around you: tiny organisms living on your cheeks, under your sofa and in the soil in your backyard. We have an adversarial relationship with these microbes -- we sanitize, exterminate and disinfect them -- but according to microbiologist Anne Madden, they're sources of new technologies and medicines waiting to be discovered. These microscopic alchemists aren't gross, Madden says -- they're the future.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This TED Talk features my probial researcher Anne Madden, recorded live at TED 2017.
0:09.0	I want you to touch your face. Go on. What do you feel? Soft? Squishy? It's you, right? You're feeling you?
0:20.9	Well, it's not quite true.
0:23.4	You're actually feeling thousands of microscopic creatures
0:26.6	that live on our face and fingers.
0:30.2	You're feeling some of the fungi that drifted down from the air ducts today.
0:35.2	They set off our allergies and smell of mildew.
0:40.1	You're feeling some of the 100 billion bacterial cells
0:44.4	that live on our skin.
0:46.6	They've been munching away at your skin oils
0:49.1	and replicating, producing the smells of body odor.
0:53.7	You're likely even touching the fecal bacteria
0:56.2	that sprayed onto you the last time you flushed a toilet.
1:00.1	Or those bacteria that live in our water pipes
1:03.2	and sprayed onto you with your last shower.
1:06.7	Sorry.
1:09.0	You are probably even giving a microscopic high-five
1:12.9	to the two species of mites that live on our faces,
1:16.7	on all of our faces.
1:19.0	They've spent the night squirming across your face
1:21.5	and having sex on the bridge of your nose.
1:27.9	Many of them are now leaking their gut contents onto your pores.
	...

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