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With this in mind, a growing chorus has called for broader sealing (also called "expungement") of criminal records. Sealing an official criminal record hides it from view by employers, landlords, and others doing formal background checks. However, relatively few criminal records are currently eligible for sealing (typically minor offenses committed a long time ago), and the process to have a record sealed is complicated and costly. Advocates are pushing to expand the set of records eligible for sealing-and to leverage technology to make sealing automatic. These are often referred to as 'Clean Slate' policies.

"When animals die, waves of microbes consume their corpses. Scientists have looked at how this "necrobiome" changes over the hours and days after an animal perishes. But Saitta's work suggests that microbes continue to colonize cadavers long after their flesh has decayed, after their bones have turned to stone, and after they've been buried several miles deep for millions of years.   MORE STORIES A Dinosaur So Well Preserved, It Looks Like a Statue ED YONG How a Fossil Can Reveal the Color of a Dinosaur CARI ROMM The Counterintuitive Way That Microbes Survive in Antarctica ED YONG The Scientist Who Stumbled Upon a Tick Full of 20-Million-Year-Old Blood SARAH ZHANG That came as a huge surprise to Tullis Onstott, a microbiologist from Princeton who worked with Saitta, and who always thought of fossils as inert and inanimate. "I thought that dinosaur bone must be some kind of sealed sarcophagus," he says. "It's not, by any means. It's basically a condo for bacteria. Now the question becomes: Is this true for all dinosaur bones?""