NYC Subway Bacteria: Shake 10,000 Hands or Touch One Railling - Chris Mason

New York City subways: smelly, crowded but integral to the city's ability to move over 4 million people everyday. They're also covered in microbes. Cornell University biophysicist Chris Mason enlisted an army of willing students to swab the city's subway stations and gained some interesting perspective on the city's microbiome: 48% of the DNA isn't associated with any known bacteria; only 12% of the DNA they collected is associated with human disease; and the South Ferry station that flooded during Hurricane Sandy still shows echoes of ocean DNA that isn't found anywhere else in the city's subway system.