On this week’s show: A pill derived from human feces treats recurrent gut infections, and how a squirrel’s microbiome supplies nitrogen during hibernation.
First up this week, Staff Writer Kelly Servick joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss putting the bacterial benefits of human feces in a pill. The hope is to avoid using fecal transplants to treat recurrent gut infections caused by the bacterium Clostridium difficile.
Also this week, Hannah Carey, a professor in the department of comparative biosciences within the school of veterinary medicine at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, talks with Sarah about how ground squirrels are helped by their gut microbes during hibernation.
Challenging the dogma of gene evolution, and how chiral nanoparticles could give vaccines a boost.
In this episode:
00:45 Genome mutations may be less random than previously thought
A long-standing doctrine in evolution is that mutations can arise anywhere in a genome with equal probability. However, new research is challenging this idea of randomness, showing that mutations in the genome of the plant Arabidosisthaliana appear to happen less frequently in important regions of the genome.
16:11 How a left-handed nanoparticle could give vaccines a boost
The chirality of a molecule – whether it has a left- or right-handed orientation – can have significant impacts on how it works. This week, a team show that left-handed gold nanoparticles can stimulate the immune system of mice, and boost the activity of a flu vaccine.
We discuss some highlights from the Nature Briefing. This time, Tasmanian devils’ discerning diets break the rules on scavenging, and new techniques uncovering the sex of ancient human remains may rewrite our assumptions.
On this week’s show: How cloning can introduce diversity into an endangered species, and ramping up the pressure on iron to see how it might behave in the cores of rocky exoplanets.
Also this week, Rick Kraus, a research scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, talks about how his group used a powerful laser to compress iron to pressures similar to those found in the cores of some rocky exoplanets. If these super-Earths’ cores are like our Earth’s, they may have a protective magnetosphere that increases their chances of hosting life.
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