What Lives in Your Refrigerator?

Microbes, microbes, everywhere — and the researchers of the Wild Life of Your Home project want to sequence them all. Ecologists at North Carolina State University are asking for the public's help in collecting the various creatures that live in people's homes in order to sequence and identify them, reports Wired's Danielle Venton. "It's Lewis and Clark without all the danger, project leader Rob Dunn tells Venton. "It is easy to assume that people living in different environments will have different microbes growing around them, but we haven't had the geographic data yet." The researchers are looking for 10 homes from each state, five in urban areas and five in rural areas. They hope to both uncover new species of microbes and learn more about which microbes grow where, Venton adds.