Chronoastrobiology: proposal, nine conferences, heliogeomagnetics, transyears, near-weeks, near-decades, phylogenetic and ontogenetic memories.

“Chronoastrobiology: are we at the threshold of a new science? Is there a critical mass for scientific research?” A simple photograph of the planet earth from outer space was one of the greatest contributions of space exploration. It drove home in a glance that human survival depends upon the wobbly dynamics in a thin and fragile skin of water and gas that covers a small globe in a mostly cold and vast universe. This image raised the stakes in understanding our place in that universe, in finding out where we came from and in choosing a path for survival. Since that landmark photograph was taken, new astronomical and biomedical information and growing computer power have been revealing that organic life, including human life, is and has been connected to invisible (non-photic) forces, in that vast universe in some surprising ways. Every cell in our body is bathed in an external and internal environment of fluctuating magnetism. It is becoming clear that the fluctuations are primarily caused by an intimate and systematic interplay between forces within the bowels of the earth–which the great physician and father of magnetism William Gilbert called a ’small magnet’–and the thermonuclear turbulence within the sun, an enormously larger magnet than the earth, acting upon organisms, which are minuscule magnets. It follows and is also increasingly apparent that these external fluctuations in magnetic fields can affect virtually every circuit in the biological machinery to a lesser or greater degree, depending both on the particular biological system and on the particular properties of the magnetic fluctuations. The development of high technology instruments and computer power, already used to visualize the human heart and brain, is furthermore making it obvious that there is a statistically predictable time structure to the fluctuations in the sun’s thermonuclear turbulence and thus to its magnetic interactions with the earth’s own magnetic field and hence a time structure to the magnetic fields in organisms. Likewise in humans, and in at least those other species that have been studied, computer power has enabled us to discover statistically defined endogenous physiological rhythms and further direct effects that are associated with these invisible geo- and heliomagnetic cycles. Thus, what once might have been dismissed as noise in both magnetic and physiological data does in fact have structure. And we may be at the threshold of understanding the biological and medical meaning and consequences of these patterns and biological-astronomical linkages as well. Structures in time are called chronomes; their mapping in us and around us is called chronomics. The scientific study of chronomes is chronobiology. And the scientific study of all aspects of biology related to the cosmos has been called astrobiology. Hence we may dub the new study of time structures in biology with regard to influences from cosmo- helio- and geomagnetic rhythms chronoastrobiology. It has, of course, been understood for centuries that the movements of the earth in relation to the sun produce seasonal and daily cycles in light energy and that these have had profound effects on the evolution of life. It is now emerging that rhythmic events generated from within the sun itself, as a large turbulent magnet in its own right, can have direct effects upon life on earth. Moreover, comparative studies of diverse species indicate that there have also been ancient evolutionary effects shaping the endogenous chronomic physiological characteristics of life. Thus the rhythms of the sun can affect us not only directly, but also indirectly through the chronomic patterns that solar magnetic rhythms have created within our physiology in the remote past. For example, we can document the direct exogenous effects of given specific solar wind events upon human blood pressure and heart rate. We also have evidence of endogenous internal rhythms in blood pressure and heart rate that are close to but not identical to the period length of rhythms in the solar wind. These were installed genetically by natural selection at some time in the distant geological past. This interpretive model of the data makes the prediction that the internal and external influences on heart rate and blood pressure can reinforce or cancel each other out at different times. A study of extensive clinical and physiological data shows that the interpretive model is robust and that internal and external effects are indeed augmentative at a statistically significant level. Chronoastrobiological studies are contributing to basic science–that is, our understanding is being expanded as we recognize heretofore unelaborated linkages of life to the complex dynamics of the sun, and even to heretofore unelaborated evolutionary phenomena. Once, one might have thought of solar storms as mere transient ‘perturbations’ to biology, with no lasting importance. Now we are on the brink of understanding that solar turbulences have played a role in shaping endogenous physiological chronomes. There is even documentation for correlations between solar magnetic cycles and psychological swings, eras of belligerence and of certain expressions of sacred or religious feelings. Chronoastrobiology can surely contribute to practical applications as well as to basic science. It can help develop refinements in our ability to live safely in outer space, where for example at the distance of the moon the magnetic influences of the sun will have an effect upon humans unshielded by the earth’s native magnetic field. We should be better able to understand these influences as physiological and mechanical challenges, and to improve our estimations of the effects of exposure. Chronoastrobiology moreover holds great promise in broadening our perspectives and powers in medicine and public health right here upon the surface of the earth. Even the potential relevance of chronoastrobiology for practical environmental and agricultural challenges cannot be ruled out at this early stage in our understanding of the apparently ubiquitous effects of magnetism and hence perhaps of solar magnetism on life. The evidence already mentioned that fluctuations in solar magnetism can influence gross clinical phenomena such as rates of strokes and heart attacks, and related cardiovascular variables such as blood pressure and heart rate, should illustrate the point that the door is open to broad studies of clinical implications. The medical value of better understanding magnetic fluctuations as sources of variability in human physiology falls into several categories: 1) The design of improved analytical and experimental controls in medical research. Epidemiological analyses require that the multiple sources causing variability in physiological functions and clinical phenomena be identified and understood as thoroughly as possible, in order to estimate systematic alterations of any one variable. 2) Preventive medicine and the individual patients’care. There are no flat ‘baselines’, only reference chronomes. Magnetic fluctuations can be shown statistically to exacerbate health problems in some cases. The next step should be to determine whether vulnerable individuals can be identified by individual monitoring. Such vulnerable patients may then discover that they have the option to avoid circumstances associated with anxiety during solar storms, and/or pay special attention to their medication or other treatments. Prehabilitation by self-help can hopefully complement and eventually replace much costly rehabilitation. 3) Basic understanding of human physiological mechanisms. The chronomic organization of physiology implies a much more subtle dynamic integration of functions than is generally appreciated. All three categories of medical value in turn pertain to the challenges for space science of exploring and colonizing the solar system. The earth’s native magnetic field acts like an enormous umbrella that offers considerable protection on the surface from harsh solar winds of charged particles and magnetic fluxes. The umbrella becomes weaker with distance from the earth and will offer little protection for humans, other animals, and plants in colonies on the surface of the moon or beyond. Thus it is important before more distant colonization is planned or implemented to better understand those magnetism-related biological- solar interactions that now can be studied conveniently on earth. Thorough lifelong maps of chronomes should be generated and made available to the scientific world. Individual workers should not have to rediscover cycles and rhythms, which can be a confusing source of variation when ignored. By contrast, once mapped, the endpoints of a spectral element in chronomes can serve everybody, for instance for the detection of an elevation of vascular disease risk. Chronomic cartography from birth to death is a task for governments to implement, thereby serving the interests of transdisciplinary science and the general public alike. Governments have supported the systematic gathering of physical data for nearly two centuries on earth in order to serve exploration, trade, and battle on land and on the seas, and indeed agriculture. These government functions have been augmented enormously with satellite technology in more recent decades. The biological comparison with regard to government support and chronomic needs would be the mapping of the human genome. The complete sequences of DNA might have eventually become available due simply to countless individual laboratories publishing piecemeal results in scattered journals. But there would have been enormous redundancy and confusion in assembling and piecing the information together. The waste of time and money involved in the redundancy and confusion would have been considerable. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED)

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Jacopo Annese, Director of the Brain Observatory at the University of California at San Diego and his team are creating open-access, high-resolution, three-dimensional atlases of the human brain. This is done through a painstaking and exacting process of slicing brain specimens tissue thin, drying, staining, storing them, scanning each slice in stunningly high resolution and finally serving it all up digitally as a virtual model.

While shooting at the Brain Observatory at the University of California at San Diego, Spencer Lowell photographed floor-to-ceiling freezers loaded with brains in giant plastic buckets, high-tech slicers being used to dice frozen human brains, and laboratory assistants meticulously unfolding gauzy brain slices with paintbrushes onto glass slides. Lowell noted that the Brain Observatory Director Jacopo Annese came across as a humanitarian as well as a neurological anatomist. Lowell: “Jacopo Annese’s job may be to orchestrate the dissecting, preserving, categorizing, and digitally archiving the brains of his donors, but he seemed to genuinely care as much about what the donors were like while they were alive. Since he’s recording what a person’s brain looks like after having lived a life full of experiences, he stressed the importance of learning about those experiences and how they could have imprinted the brain.”

Indeed, much of the emphasis at the Brain Observatory and its related brain library project will be on finding donors who are able to participate in a monitoring, data-gathering program while they are still alive and healthy. The intended purpose would be to link this more personal information–an anonymous narrative biography, for example, to the scientific brain data to create a more complete picture.

Photograph by Spencer Lowell

Brain specimen at UCSD’s Brain Obervatory, Nov 18th, 2009

The most violent winds in our own solar system whip around the Great Dark Spot of Neptune at 1,200 miles per hour, making the worst storms here on Earth look like kid stuff. But when astronomers trained their telescopes on one of the longest-studied planets around another star, suddenly even Neptune didn’t look so impressive. This week in Nature, astronomers say that the exoplanet HD 209458 b has a super-storm whose winds rage at 3,000 to 6,000 mph.

The exoplanet (which we’ll call by its friendlier nickname, Osiris) sits 150 light years from here, in the neighborhood of the constellation Pegasus. It’s an old friend, too. Osiris was the first exoplanet seen transiting in front of its star back in 1999. A decade later, though, with technology a decade more advanced, the team could spy on Osiris with the a spectrometer at the Very Large Telescope in Chile and track its carbon monoxide signature.

In fact, the VLT’s data is so good that the astronomers could see not only the planet’s orbital speed, but also the relative speed of the gas on its surface, according to study author Ignas Snellen.

“We see this clear change in velocity” of HD 209458 b, Snellen says. “There’s also an offset—the gas during the transit seems to be moving toward us.” The carbon monoxide appears to be flowing at two kilometers per second, or roughly 7,000 kilometers [~4,350 miles] per hour [Scientific American].

Why so stormy? Osiris is dangerously close to its star, creating a huge temperature imbalance.

Because the planet circles its star at a distance only one-twentieth of the distance between Earth and the sun, the temperature of the upper atmosphere on HD 209458b’s sun-facing side is thought to be as high as 18,000 degrees Fahrenheit (10,000 degrees Celsius) while the dark side is much cooler. The upper layers of the atmosphere were observed rushing from the hot side to the cold side [MSNBC].

The team’s data produced a second effect that, while drier than a splendorous super-storm, is perhaps more important to science. Up to now, astronomers have guessed exoplanet mass indirectly—seeing a star move oh-so-slightly and computing the mass the orbiting planet would need to produce that effect. But these scientists managed to figure Osiris’ size directly once they determined its orbital velocity.

With relative ease, Snellen’s team was then able to calculate the masses of both star and planet using Newton’s law of gravitation, knowing also the velocity of the host star due to its orbit round the centre of mass of the system. “This is exactly the same method used to calculate the mass of binary star systems, except one of the bodies here is an exoplanet,” says Snellen [Physics World].

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Image: European Southern Observatory

Think picking a date on looks alone is a little shallow? How about picking your kids? The owners of the dating site BeautifulPeople.com have no qualms on the subject–they’ve launched a “virtual sperm and egg bank” where users can select beautiful people’s beautiful genetics by signing up for their beautiful gametes.

Though the company won’t perform egg extractions or accept sperm donations, they will serve as matchmakers and then forward the interested parties to the proper clinics. The company says its exclusive dating site–you can only join if other members judge you attractive enough–is a magnificent resource for those looking to breed up.

As reported by ABC News, the site has decided to generously offer its services even to the beauty-challenged.

“Initially, we hesitated to widen the offering to non-beautiful people. But everyone–including ugly people–would like to bring good looking children in to the world, and we can’t be selfish with our attractive gene pool,” company founder Robert Hintze said in a statement.

Everyone from bioethicists to the professionals who run clinics are concerned about site visitors skipping over the proper medical and psychological screenings. There is also concern about the participants’ expectations–and perhaps basic understanding of genetics. Just because biological mummy and daddy have good looks, it doesn’t necessarily mean their offspring will. If BeautifulPeople.com doesn’t make that clear, things could get very ugly.

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Image: flickr / alainelorza

After yesterday’s depressing picture, how about one that will make you smile?

The ever-amazing Cassini spacecraft sent back this pretty nifty shot of Saturn’s icy moon Rhea playing peekaboo in the rings:

Beautiful, isn’t it? You can see that Rhea was on the other side of the rings from Cassini when this image was taken, and that the spacecraft was almost, but not quite, in the plane of the rings, too.

But there’s more to this shot… Take a closer look. What’s that, hiding in a gap in the rings, apparently hovering over Rhea’s terminator (the line dividing day and night)?

Surprise! It’s Prometheus, a tiny potato orbiting the planet much closer in. It’s far smaller than Rhea, only about 120 km (75 miles) long versus Rhea’s 1530 km (950 miles) diameter. Rhea is Saturn’s second largest moon — only Titan is bigger — and one of the ten biggest moons in the entire solar system. Prometheus, on the other hand, is so small it wasn’t even discovered until the Voyager 1 probe spotted it in 1980.

Nice. And I’m sure there’s science galore to be extracted from this image, but sometimes I think pictures like this will have a more lasting impact because they are simply so amazingly cool.

Tip o’ the F Ring to CICLOPS imaging team leader Carolyn Porco. Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute.

As the 2006 Sea Grant Fellow for Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL), I spent much of the year working hard to keep oil drilling away from the state's coast. I am completely devastated to see photos of the Panhandle taken this morning by The Ocean Conservany. The full set is here, but be warned, these images are hard to see...

It makes for a good movie: 12,900 years ago, a comet slams into Earth, igniting forest fires across North America and sending the planet into a thousand cold years, killing off mammoths, giant sloths, and a bunch of other big mammals. But scientists have fiercely debated whether such a movie, about the cause of the planet-wide cooling period called the Younger Dryas, should be documentary or science fiction. According to a paper recently published in the Geophysical Research Letters, new evidence–or refuted, old evidence–points to science fiction.

Those that think a comet hit the planet cite “carbonaceous spherules” and nanodiamonds found in sediment from the period of the suspected impact. They argue that these particles formed from the intense heat of the collision.

Lead author of this new study, Andrew Scott of the University of London in Egham suspects those spherules are not from a comet collision, but are bug poop, fungal spores, or charcoal pellets.

From a test that measures how much light the spherules reflect, Scott’s team has determined that the spherules were slow-roasted in a low-intensity heat (perhaps from natural wildfires) instead of in intense, comet impact heat. As shown in the figure, the researchers compare the charred spherules to fungal sclerotia, emergency cell balls created by stressed fungi that can germinate after a bad growing period is over, and saw a striking similarity.

Some of the more elongate particles are “certainly fecal pellets, probably from termites,” says Scott…. “There’s certainly no evidence [that any of these particles are] related to intense fire from a comet impact,” says Scott. Part of the problem, he says, is that “there was nobody [among impact proponents] who ever worked on charcoal deposits, modern or ancient. If you’re not familiar with the material, you can make mistakes.” [Science Now]

Scott’s team also radiocarbon dated the particles, and says those spherules aren’t unique to the collision time.

“There is a long history of fire in the fossil record, and these fungal samples are common everywhere, from ancient times to the present,” Scott says. “These data support our conclusion that there wasn’t one single intense fire that triggered the onset of the cold period.” [American Geophysical Union]

Other researchers aren’t buying it–like James Kennett, a proponent of the impact theory from the University of California, Santa Barbara.

“We disagree that charred fungal sclerotia … have the same morphology” as certain carbonaceous spherules, paleoceanographer James Kennett writes in an e-mail. “Their alternate hypothesis that the carbon spherules are simply charred fungal spores is incorrect.”[ScienceNOW]

Kennett also clings to the nanodiamonds that impact-believers say formed under the extreme conditions of the collision. The new study doesn’t address these nanodiamonds, but Scott says there is more to come.

His team has studied the nanodiamond issue, but he’s not yet able to discuss the results. He did, however, hint that the particles might not be nanodiamonds at all: Fungal spores the team examined have similar microscopic features. And, Scott said, “obviously [spores] are not nanodiamonds.” [National Geographic]

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Image: American Geophysical Union

This week’s crucial whaling meeting continues until Friday has come and gone, but the result is… nothing.

As we reported last week, the International Whaling Commission (IWC) was ready to consider a proposal to lift a quarter-century-old moratorium on whaling, in exchange for agreements from whaling nations like Japan, Norway, and Iceland to reduce their catches over the coming decade.

Whaling in Antarctic waters, where Japan hunts hundreds of whales each year, would have been sharply curtailed. But that became the major sticking point in the talks. Delegates said that Japan and antiwhaling nations could not reach agreement on the size of the catch and that Tokyo had balked at agreeing to eventually phase out the hunt altogether [The New York Times].

The talks will continue into next year while some whaling continues under loopholes in the old rules. But given the present impasse it seems like the IWC nations are a long way from agreeing on anything.

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Image: Flickr/ Rene Ehrhardt

Via SciFiWire comes this amazing series pictures from the SciFi Airshow. This is seriously cool geeky stuff.

Sigh. Beautiful. The gifted artist Bill George has created a huge series of pictures depicting real-life scenes with some of the best science fiction spaceships of all time. I suspect most of you out there haven’t even heard of the old scifi series "Space:1999" — it had a profound impact on my young self, and it spawned one of the most beautiful ships of all time: the Eagle. George has created a whole passel of Eagle images, and they’re spectacular! He even has several hi-res versions you can download.

He has shots of ships from "Battlestar Galactica", "2001", "Land of the Giants" (who remembers that show?), and "Star Trek". These are truly amazing photos he’s put together, and if you’re of a certain age I expect your heart will pang with what could’ve been.

I hope he puts out a lot more of these. My heart races when I watch rocket launches and space activity IRL, but it was these shows that excited and inspired me as a kid… and still do as a grownup. We need to dream, and seeing these dreams made real — even if only in Photoshop — is still compelling.

As we continue to talk about energy, we'll be exploring its relationship with the food we eat. Food and energy are inextricably linked, but all too often, their connections are overlooked. But before we begin considering average daily per capita intake for humans and how that relates to production and availability, it's necessary to consider that an adequate amount of food is a vastly different topic from nutrition. The US National Research Council has set Recommended Daily Allowances for what we consume, which includes vitamins, minerals, and trace elements. In affluent countries like ours, it's relatively easy to obtain what we need, but micronutrient deficiencies occur at very high numbers globally. Micronutrients are necessary to make hormones, enzymes, and ensure proper growth and development. So deficiencies can lead to mental impairment, blindness, compromised immunity, infant mortality, hearing loss, and more. Billions around the world are now at risk. In Feeding the World, Vaclav Smil writes "the eradication of micronutrient deficiencies could exceed the impact of the global elimination of smallpox." How to get there--or at least, move in that direction? We can either provide the necessary foods to those who do not currently have regular access to them and/or make supplements readily ...

Trying to cut back on beef, but tired of fish and chicken? Try unicorn. According to a joke advertisement on the website ThinkGeek, unicorn is the “new white meat.”

But according to the National Pork Board, it had better not be. The Board’s lawyers sent the nerdy site–also sellers of Tauntaun sleeping bags (real) and Tribbles ‘n’ Bits cereal (fake)–a 12-page-long, cease-and-desist letter last month telling the site to lay off “the other white meat,” which is trademarked in the United States, Europe, and Canada.

ThinkGeek thinks the two meats can’t compare. Unlike pork, unicorn is an excellent source of sparkles. Also unlike pigs, unicorns aren’t real–so ThinkGeek believes the slogan “Pate is passe. Unicorn — the new white meat” constitutes fair use as a parody.

As reported in The Washington Post, Board spokeswoman Ceci Snyder says their lawyers must protect any use of the phrase:

“Clearly there’s some fun being had, and we can laugh, too,” Snyder said. “But in the end [the lawyers are] just following the law.”

From their site, it doesn’t look like ThinkGeek is budging. If the Pork Board is successful, maybe the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association might have a better sense of humor. “Unicorn: It’s What’s For Dinner” has a nice ring to it.

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Image: flickr / Scorpiorules58 / Tanakawho

The latest entry into the cellphones-radiation-health debate is a British study of thousands of children, which investigated whether the proximity of pregnant women to cellphone towers had any effect on whether their kids developed tumors or leukemia. The result: a big no.

Researchers from Imperial College London identified 1,397 children under five who were diagnosed with leukaemia or a tumour of the brain or central nervous system between 1999 and 2001. They compared each child with four children of the same gender who were born on the same day but had not developed cancer [The Guardian].

They then cross-compared all those children to how much radiation their mothers likely received during pregnancy, based on a survey of more than 80,000 cell towers and their radiation output. No matter how they ran the numbers, the team couldn’t find a significant effect.

For instance, the mothers whose children were diagnosed with cancer lived an average of 1,173 yards from a cellphone tower while they were pregnant — statistically indistinguishable from the 1,211 yards that separated the other pregnant women from their nearest cellphone towers. Tallying up the total power output of all cellphone towers within 766 yards of each pregnant woman’s home, they found that both groups had nearly the same exposure — 2.89 kilowatts for the mothers of cancer victims and 3.00 kilowatts for the other mothers [Los Angeles Times].

In a commentary that accompanied the study in the British Medical Journal, John Bithell notes its weaknesses. First, to take such a large sample requires estimating a person’s radiation exposure based on their address; measuring it more directly would be “scientifically valuable,” Bithell writes, though right now that’s impractical for such a large study. The scientists also couldn’t estimate the cellphone usage by mothers during pregnancy, or which of them may have moved.

Even so, he says, the independently funded study is strong, and reinforces the fact that people should be more worried about known dangers like driving and talking than they should be about living near cell towers, which seems to have no effect.

“It’s reassuring,” said Elliott, a professor of epidemiology and public health medicine at Imperial College in London. “On the basis of our results, people living near mobile phone stations shouldn’t consider moving based on health reasons” [AP].

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Image: flickr / Jeff Kubina

Just kidding with the title. I don't have anything particularly insightful to say about the physics of the game. Rather, this post is just to say, I'm off to watch the USA (and England). I won't be blogging this am at least until that is over and done with. But I'm sure people have opinions about the team, so this is a place to leave them, and discuss the game....

Some good news from Texas! Yeehaw!

The Institute for Creation Research — one of the biggest nonsense-peddlers in the 6000 year history of the world — was handed a nice defeat this week. That link to the National Center for Science Education (the good guys) has all the info you need, but to summarize: the ICR moved from California to Texas. In the previous state, for reasons beyond understanding, they were able to grant Master’s degrees in their graduate school. But Texas didn’t recognize their accreditation, so they filed to get it approved.

Not so surprisingly, scientists and educators rose in protest, and in 2008 the Texas Higher Education Coordination Board — the organization that grants accreditation — denied the ICR. The creationists appealed. In the meantime, they also tried to extend their ability to grant degrees temporarily while the lawsuit continued. What happened this week is that the extension as denied.

And I mean denied. Check out what the court said:

It appears that although the Court has twice required Plaintiff [the ICR] to re-plead and set forth a short and plain statement of the relief requested, Plaintiff is entirely unable to file a complaint which is not overly verbose, disjointed, incoherent, maundering, and full of irrelevant information.

That’s not surprising, as that’s the only kind of information the ICR is capable of producing. Not to mention wrong. See the Related Posts links below for lots more on the ICR’s recent follies.

As far as I can tell, this defeat means that the ICR is still seeking accreditation, but until and unless it does, it cannot grant degrees in Texas.

So what can be said about this? Oh, let me quote one of the pithiest and to-the-point minds of our day:

<Nelson Muntz>Haha!</Nelson Muntz>

They are mum’s first gift to her newborn baby on the day of its zeroeth birthday – bacteria, fresh from her vagina. Vaginal bacteria are among the trillions of microscopic hitchhikers that share our bodies with us. Collectively known as the ‘microbiota’, these passengers outnumber our own cells by ten to one. Children partly inherit their microbiota from their mothers. During birth, they pass from the largely bacteria-free conditions of the womb through the microbe-laden vagina into the equally bacterial outside world.

Being slathered in vaginal microbes might not seem like much of a treat from our adult perspective, but to a newborn, it’s a key event. The microbiota are important partners, influencing our physiology and our risk of disease. Now, Maria Dominguez-Bello from the University of Puerto Rico found that the way we enter the world determines the identities of our first bacterial colonisers. Babies delivered by Caesarean section end up with a very different portfolio to those who are born naturally.

To characterise baby’s first bacteria, Dominguez-Bello compared the microbiota of 10 mothers and their newborn babies, four of who had been delivered naturally and six of who were born through C-sections. She sampled the mothers’ skins, mouths and vaginas an hour before delivery, and the babies’ skins, mouths and noses less than five minutes afterwards.

She found that all the infants had the same bacteria all over their bodies. That’s very different to the situation in the mothers (and indeed, other adults), where different parts of the body are as varied in their resident species as deserts are to rainforests. In adult bodies, certain species of bacteria dominate certain habitats, so that your butt microbes have more in common with mine that they do with your elbow bacteria. Again, this wasn’t the case in babies.

Dominguez-Bello also found that the membership of the babies’ bacterial clubs was mainly influenced by their route of delivery. Those who were delivered naturally harboured bacteria all over their bodies that resembled those in their mother’s vagina – mainly Lactobacillus, which help us to digest milk.

But babies who were delivered by C-section were colonised by bacteria that are more commonly found on the skin, including Staphylococcus. These colonists didn’t necessarily come from mum either. The skin bacteria of C-section mothers were no more similar to those of their own babies than to those of other infants delivered in the same way. Instead, it seems that C-section babies pick their first bacteria from the hospital environment.

These early differences could directly affect a baby’s health. Staphylococcus is mostly benign but they can also go rogue, causing a wide variety of infections from spots to pneumonia. Antibiotic-resistant strains such as MRSA are particularly problematic and it’s perhaps unsurprising that in a Californian study, between 64-82% of newborns with MRSA infections were delivered through C-sections.

Other scientists have found similar trends for the bacteria in a baby’s gut, which also differ depending on how the child is delivered. Dominguez-Bello’s new study extends this knowledge to other parts of the body, but it’s more of a starting point for further research (and perhaps a narrow one at that, given that it only considered ten babies) rather than a conclusion in itself. We still need to understand the shifts that take place as children grow and the members of their microbiota rise, fall and take up residence in different body parts.

Dominguez-Bello suspects that all of these events hinge on the moment of birth. She thinks that the bacterial heirlooms that babies inherit from their mothers might act as a shield, preventing more dangerous microbes like MRSA from setting up shop. In this way, early colonisers can influence the direction of late successions. By changing baby’s first bacteria, C-sections could alter the make-up of their later communities, leading to long-term effects on health and nutrition.

There is some evidence to support this idea, but to date, it’s pretty circumstantial. Some studies have suggested that babies delivered through C-section might be more susceptible to allergies, although the increase in risk is pretty small. Nonetheless, in one study, probiotic drinks containing Lactobacillus could help to counteract this increased risk, at least for some types of allergies.

Results like these are easy to politicise, especially since a quarter of babies in the UK are delivered by Caesarean section. But this study is no condemnation of C-section deliveries, which are often necessary. Opinion pieces often decry women who opt for elective C-sections because they are allegedly “too posh to push”, but the reality is very different to the ones these straw (wo)men caricatures present. Official records show that such births only account for 1.5% of the total. And last year, a UK study showed that just 3% of women would opt for a C-section if they didn’t have a medical need for one.

It’s also important to note that this new study merely documents how the method of delivery affects the bacteria that babies inherit. The effect that this has on our health is still largely speculative (contrary to what some papers would have you believe). And whether those effects have any significant importance in the grand scheme of things also remains to be seen. Dominguez-Bello’s paper ends with a call for more research and that’s exactly what is now needed.

Reference: PNAS http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1002601107

More on the microbiota:

• Gut bacteria in Japanese people borrowed sushi-digesting genes from ocean bacteria
• The bacterial zoo in your bowel
• The bacterial zoo living on your skin
• Gut bacteria – fat or thin, family or friends, shared or unique
• Human gut bacteria linked to obesity