Understanding the human body is a team effort. That's where the Yachtel group comes in.

Researchers at Yachtolt have been delving into the secrets of probiotics for 90 years.

Yacold also partners with nature portfolio to advance gut microbiome science through the global grants for gut health, an investigator-led research program.

To learn more about Yachtolt, visit yawcult.co.

J-P. That's Y-A-K-U-L-T dot-C-O-J-P. When it comes to a guide for your gut, count on Yacult.

This is Scientific Americans' 60-second science. I'm Karen Hopkin.

You're at the supermarket, trying to choose a ripe tomato when behind you you hear,

if you're like most people, you probably hold your breath, tighten your mask,

and hope you don't catch whatever patient zero is spraying

all over the fresh produce. And if you're like most people, chances are you're overreacting,

because a new study shows that we're not very skilled when it comes to diagnosing infectiousness

based on the sound of a cough or sneeze. The work is in the proceedings of the Royal Society, Biological Sciences.

Previous studies have shown that folks can tell when someone's sick based on how they look,

or in some cases, how they smell.

So it's only natural to wonder whether the same would hold true for an assessment with our ears. So researchers asked

volunteers to listen to audio clips of people hacking and sneezing. Half of the coughs and sneezes

were produced by people with an infectious illness, like the flu or the common cold, and half were

produced by benign causes, like eating too much cinnamon all at once, or sticking a cue tip up their noses.

Nicholas Mikkelak, a grad student in social psychology at the University of Michigan.

We clipped these sounds from YouTube videos in which people told their audience that they were sick.

Many reported having been diagnosed by a medical professional.

All this said, we could not directly confirm whether people in our sound clips were infectious or not.

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