Dr. Kevin Foster, from the University of Oxford, visited the Center for Evolution and Medicine at Arizona State University last week to talk about competition and sociability among a variety of bacteria, some of which call our guts home. Using humorous descriptions of...
The German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, is known for a number of ideas among which a particularly oft-quoted one is, “That which does not kill us makes us stronger” (https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/30-that-which-does-not-kill-us-makes-us-stronger). A recent...
For decades food manufacturers have marketed saccharin, along with other non-caloric artificial sweeteners (NAS), as healthy alternatives to sugar. Artificial sugar substitutes cannot be digested by humans and have been recommended for patients with diabetes and for...
In 2005 Sarkis Mazmanian and colleagues showed that a single polysaccharide from an intestinal commensal, Bacteroides fragilis, could largely correct the subnormal and functionally distorted development of the immune system that occurs in germ-free mice (Mazmanian et...