Congratulations, You Have Your Own Personal Germ Cloud - TIME

You did a lot more in the last 24 hours than you think. Yes, you got up, went to work, took care of the kids. But in your spare moments, you also found the time to shed at least 24 million biological particles—bacteria, viruses, spores and more—into the air around you, or a nifty 1 million nasties per hour.

If it’s any consolation, you’re not alone. We all continually emit our own microbial cloud into the air and onto nearby—and not so nearby—surfaces. Now, according to a new study in the open-access journal Peerj, scientists can distinguish the make-up of the cloud is uniquely yours—a personal marker that is as particular to you as your fingerprints or your genome. That’s a biological calling card that could have implications for epidemiology, environmental engineering or even, intriguingly, criminal forensics.

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