There’s a food fight in your guts. Not the Tater-Tot-chucking, spoonful-of-mashed potato-flinging, melee-in-the-cafeteria type of food fight. Rather, your intestines are the site of an ancient and complex war between your own cells and trillions of bacteria—a war over what happens to your food as it moves through your body. Some of the bacteria form [...]

A talent search preceding this year’s TED conference turned up enough startlingly smart prodigies to lend an American Idol feel to the event. There was the 15-year-old who invented a better test for pancreatic cancer, the 18-year-old who presented his second nuclear reactor design, and the 13-year-old  who strung flickering light-emitting diodes around his family’s [...]

Americans have been on an antibacterial kick for the past several years. Our hand soap, dish soap, and body wash have morphed into an arsenal of bug-killing napalm, eliminating all but the heartiest of bacteria. And there are, indeed, some scary microbes crawling around out there—Staph and C. Diff, just to name a couple. But [...]

The relationship between food and a gastro-intestinal disease might sound simple. But new research is revealing that what we put into our bodies can cause a cascade of complex interactions among various systems—from metabolism to the immune system—that keep us well or make us sick. And it appears that a popular component of the classic [...]

What is the dirtiest thing on your desk? If you work in a typical office, it’s not actually your computer mouse or your keyboard or even your desk. According to a new study, published online May 30 in PLoS ONE, it’s your phone—but your chair’s not far behind. Before you drop that receiver or leap [...]

The latest research into the genetics of the human microbiome is taking to a whole new level the old (and not always fruitful) argument about whether nature or nurture is a more important influence in our lives. In the past few days, Science Express published a paper that demonstrated that friendly (or commensal) bacteria don’t [...]

Personal oral hygiene notwithstanding, your mouth is sloshing with hundreds of species of microorganisms. Most are harmless, but some can do real damage, such as causing periodontitis, in which the microbes that cause plaque get below the gum line, leading to inflammation and infection. Researchers have had a tough time sorting out all of these [...]

The diverse wilderness of life inside of our bodies is just starting to gain the attention of scientists. The human gut alone typically holds some 100,000 billion bitty bacteria, and with no two people’s microbiomes being the same, classifying these crucial organisms has been challenging. A new study, published online April 20 in Nature, proposes [...]

Scientists collect crazy things. I’m not talking thimble-crazy or frog-themed-crazy. That kind of tchotchke barely ranks on the crazy scale. The collections I’m talking about are things like bellybutton lint, whale vomit, and human poo. You mean raw sewage?! Yes, sort of… but straight from the source. Fresh, unadulterated. Yup. And to supersize the irony, [...]

Next time you see a scientist in the street, grab him or her and ask who they view as the enemy. Quite likely they’ll give you a weird look, and perhaps they’ll run away, but if they don’t, I’d bet they’d say journalists. Many scientists I know brace themselves for speaking with journalists about their [...]