By TSC Staff

The typical adult body has 17 square feet of skin.  And guess what?  It's crawling with critters.

New research in the journal Science finds that healthy skin is covered with far more bugs and bacteria than previously known.

As the Los Angeles Times explains: "People's bodies are ecosystems, believed home to trillions of bacteria, fungi and other microbes that naturally coexist in the skin, the digestive tract and other spots. But scientists don't have a good grasp of which microbes live where, much less which are helpful, even indispensable, in maintaining health."

NowThe NIH's "Human Microbiome Project" aims to change that, recruiting healthy volunteers to learn what microbes they harbor so scientists can compare the healthy with diseases of microbes gone awry — from acute infections to mysterious conditions like psoriasis or irritable bowel syndrome.