Curiosity Daily Podcast: Did Your Microbiome Come from Dirt?

Award-winning journalist and economist Tim Harford explains three simple rules for understanding statistics and evaluating truth in the news. Then, you’ll learn about why our microbiomes may have come from dirt.

March 10, 2021

Episode Show Notes:

Additional resources from Tim Harford:

Microbes in dental plaque are more like soil microbes than tongue microbes, which suggests our microbiomes came from dirt by Cameron Duke

  • Caldwell, A. (2020, December 15). Microbes in dental plaque look more like relatives in soil than those on the tongue. EurekAlert! https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-12/uocm-mid121420.php
  • Shaiber, A., Willis, A. D., Delmont, T. O., Roux, S., Chen, L.-X., Schmid, A. C., Yousef, M., Watson, A. R., Lolans, K., Esen, Ö. C., Lee, S. T. M., Downey, N., Morrison, H. G., Dewhirst, F. E., Mark Welch, J. L., & Eren, A. M. (2020). Functional and genetic markers of niche partitioning among enigmatic members of the human oral microbiome. Genome Biology, 21(1). https://doi.org/10.1186/s13059-020-02195-w

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