Hands on: The colony of bacteria living on your hands - an interactive

Our hands do all sorts of things for us – they open doors, handle money at the wet market, hold on to poles on public buses and trains, all the time while grasping our phones.

Sometimes, they also act as the barrier between our coughs and the rest of the world.

To visualise the amount and variety of bacteria we regularly come in contact with, we literally got our hands dirty, going about our daily life, and then making prints of our hands on agar plates. 

Scroll through our interactive to see what we found