another widely reported study, the Belly Button Biodiversity Project, conducted by researchers at North Carolina State University, sixty random Americans had their belly buttons swabbed to see what was lurking there microbially. The study found 2,368 species of bacteria, 1,458 of which were unknown to science. (That is an average of 24.3 new-to-science microbes in every navel.) The number of species per person varied from 29 to 107. One volunteer harbored a microbe that had never been recorded outside Japan—where he had never been. The problem with antibacterial soaps is that they kill good
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