Science Trends

Analysis of nearly 2,000 people living in remote villages in Honduras reveals who’s spreading gut microorganisms to whom. Friends share more than just food when they dine together.Credit: Getty A shared meal, a kiss on the cheek: these social acts bring people together — and bring their microbiomes together, too. The more people interact, the more similar the make-up of their gut microorganisms is, even if individuals don’t live in the same household, a study1 shows. The study also found that a person’s microbiome is shaped not only by their social contacts but also by the social contacts’ connections. The work is one of several studies2 that raise the possibility that health conditions can be shaped by the transmission of the microbiome between individuals, not just by diet and other environmental factors that affect gut flora. In the quest to understand what shapes a person’s microbiome, social interactions are “definitely a piece of the puzzle that I think has been missing until rec...

Study of 1950s sugar rationing in the United Kingdom also suggests risk to babies whose mums ate a high-sugar diet during pregnancy. Candy-floss effect: a childhood diet rich in sugar has been linked to higher risk of high-blood pressure and other conditions in adulthood. Credit: Getty It’s tough news to hear on Halloween: a sugary diet in the first two years of life is linked to a  higher risk of diabetes  and high blood pressure decades later, according to an analysis of UK sugar rationing in the 1950s. The amount of sugar a child consumed after turning six months old seemed to have the biggest effect on the risk of developing a chronic disease later in life. But people exposed to more sugar in the womb also had a higher risk of  diabetes  and high blood pressure compared to those who were conceived when access to sugar was limited. Economist Tadeja Gračner was pregnant with her first child and on doctor-ordered bed rest when she and her colleagues first arrived at...

Researchers at the Complexity Science Hub and Santa Fe Institute have developed a model to calculate how quickly or slowly an organism should ideally learn in its surroundings. An organism's ideal learning rate depends on the pace of environmental change and its life cycle, they say. Every day, we wake to a world that is different, and we adjust to it. Businesses face new challenges and competitors and adapt or go bust. In biology, this is a question of survival: every organism, from bacteria to blue whales, faces the challenge of adapting to environments that are constantly in flux. Animals must learn where to seek nourishing food, even as those food sources change with the seasons. However, learning takes time and energy -- an organism that learns too slowly will lag behind environmental changes, while one that learns too quickly will waste effort trying to track meaningless fluctuations. The new mathematical model provides a quantitative answer to the question: What is the optim...