An artist named Joana Ricou has teamed up with microbiologists to create really awesome portraits of bacterial cultures of belly button microbes. There are more than 400 portraits and they are on display at the Art Laboratory Berlin as part of the exhibit Nonhuman Subjectivities.
Rob Dunn of North Carolina State University has written a charming and fascinating piece on the microbes that inhabit our belly buttons. You can find it here on the Scientific American blog site (http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2012/11/07/after-two-years-scientists-still-cant-solve-belly-button-mystery-continue-navel-gazing/). I strongly recommend it for the skill of his writing as well as the extremely interesting insights into the microbes in …