Skip to main content

If dust could talk, it would tell you how many women versus men live in your home

careful with those dust bunnies they can tell the gender split in your home homestyler 15
Image used with permission by copyright holder
Forget about what secrets walls would divulge if they could talk. Instead, be more wary of your dust. That’s right, according to a new study published recently in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, your average household dust bunny tells a shockingly accurate story about your family and the inhabitants of your home — specifically, the gender makeup and presence of pets in the house.

As study author Noah Fierer, a microbial ecologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder, told the New York Times, “Our homes are ecosystems that we spend a lot of time in, and so we approached this with a very general question. What type of microbes and fungi do we see in our homes?” As it turns out, the answer is heavily contingent on who is actually in your home.

In conducting their study, Fierer and the team analyzed the dust of 1,200 households across the continental United States. All in all, they found a total of more than 72,000 types of fungi and over 125,000 kinds of bacteria. Yikes. Moreover, the average household (just one household, mind you), boasted more than 5,000 different species of bacteria and around 2,000 species of fungi. So as clean as you may believe yourself and your rooms to be, think again. These buggers are everywhere.

As it turns out, while geographic location doesn’t have too much of an impact on what types of bacteria flourish in a house (the same types were found in both rural homes and urban homes far distant from each other), fungi serve as a better indicator. Said Fierer, “Geography is the best predictor of fungi in your home. The reason is that most fungi blow in from outdoors via soil and leaves.”

But bacteria constitute an extremely useful yardstick for the types of pets you have, and even the number of men versus women living in a house. Homes with cats had more types of certain bacteria species, while homes with dogs favored others. And when it came to gender ratios, it’s all about the B.O. Yes — body odor.

Said NC State biology professor and study co-author Rob Dunn, “We can tell if there are more men than women in a home, for example, because those homes have more armpit bacteria. Seriously.”

Ultimately, researchers feel that this dust-based profile of a home is just a first step in a much more robust final project that may one day help with forensics or allergen research. Said Dunn, “We’re just starting to look at what lives in our homes. These findings are not an exhaustive answer, they’re a first step — and the study highlights just how much we don’t know.”

Lulu Chang
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Fascinated by the effects of technology on human interaction, Lulu believes that if her parents can use your new app…
Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards
Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

Read more
Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards
Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Read more
AI turned Breaking Bad into an anime — and it’s terrifying
Split image of Breaking Bad anime characters.

These days, it seems like there's nothing AI programs can't do. Thanks to advancements in artificial intelligence, deepfakes have done digital "face-offs" with Hollywood celebrities in films and TV shows, VFX artists can de-age actors almost instantly, and ChatGPT has learned how to write big-budget screenplays in the blink of an eye. Pretty soon, AI will probably decide who wins at the Oscars.

Within the past year, AI has also been used to generate beautiful works of art in seconds, creating a viral new trend and causing a boon for fan artists everywhere. TikTok user @cyborgism recently broke the internet by posting a clip featuring many AI-generated pictures of Breaking Bad. The theme here is that the characters are depicted as anime characters straight out of the 1980s, and the result is concerning to say the least. Depending on your viewpoint, Breaking Bad AI (my unofficial name for it) shows how technology can either threaten the integrity of original works of art or nurture artistic expression.
What if AI created Breaking Bad as a 1980s anime?
Playing over Metro Boomin's rap remix of the famous "I am the one who knocks" monologue, the video features images of the cast that range from shockingly realistic to full-on exaggerated. The clip currently has over 65,000 likes on TikTok alone, and many other users have shared their thoughts on the art. One user wrote, "Regardless of the repercussions on the entertainment industry, I can't wait for AI to be advanced enough to animate the whole show like this."

Read more