A real-life experiment to mimic future conditions for soils affected by climate change suggests that some of the biggest impacts could be to ecosystems buried out of sight beneath our feet.
Evidence suggests that microbes play a vital role in health. But what microbes we get depends whether we were born in a hospital versus at home. That could impact our health decades later.
Just like the gut, the skin and the mouth, the eye also has a collection of microbes that keep it healthy. Understanding the eye microbiome may lead to new probiotic therapies.
You want to encourage the growth of good bacteria in your gut to improve health. But which foods should you eat to do that? It turns out that nutritional labels aren’t much help figuring that out.
As antibiotic resistance increases globally, the heat is on to find new alternatives to treat infections. Chemists can get a head start by looking at compounds produced in nature by fishes’ microbes.
Using the family relationships between single-celled protists alive today, researchers hypothesized what their evolutionary ancestors looked like – and then looked in the fossil record for matches.
The Trump administration wants to end federal protection under the Clean Water Act for many small streams and wetlands. But as a geoscientist explains, these are critical parts of large river systems.
There has been a dramatic rise in life-threatening food allergies in the last few decades. Antibiotics, poor diet and C-sections have all been implicated. Now new evidence points to gut microbes.
Our bodies have a set of defenses that are finely tuned for killing invading microbes. With rising cases of drug-resistant bacteria, maybe boosting our natural defenses is the best medicine.
Did you forget to put the leftovers away? If it’s only an hour or two, that’s OK, but as the temperature drops under 60 degrees, the risk of bacterial growth – and food poisoning – increases.
Researchers are exploring the possibility of creating living drugs – designer microbes that can live in our guts and provide critical components that our body needs but can’t make itself.
Leftover lactose from cheese production shows early promise as a treatment that can help soils retain water and nutrients, making them more resistant to drought.
Regular hand washing is important not only to keep from getting the flu but also to prevent passing it to others, such as young children and seniors, who may be even more vulnerable. Here’s how.
Wetlands are some of the world’s most undervalued weapons against climate change. They store huge quantities of carbon – but without better protection, many could soon be drained or paved over.
If humans are to live on Mars they will need a stable supply of food. Earth plants are not suited to the Mars climate but we can engineer plants that are.