I have you loud and clear.

Hello.

Hello.

Welcome. Science and that is the same physics, medicine, nature, or space, time, brain, life, the universe.

This week from arsenic to adrenaline, we're delving into the sinister science of poisons.

Plus training machines to identify a baby's cry and the science behind New Year's resolutions.

I'm Isie Clark.

I'm Georgia Mills and this is the Naked Scientists.

The Naked Scientists podcast is powered by UKfast.co.uk. First up why a type of sugar might be behind the spread of a superbug.

Clostridium difficile is a type of bacteria commonly found causing problems in hospital wards.

It leads to diarrhea and is responsible for thousands of deaths every year.

But it hasn't always been such a big problem. Since the 2000s, one strain or ribo type in particular has been spreading faster and becoming more dangerous.

Antibiotic resistance is part of the problem, but now a new study has revealed another

culprit maybe in our diets.

His study author Robert Britain, Professor of Microbiology at Baylor College Medicine.

We wanted to understand why they're doing better in the environment.

So one of the things we tested was whether or not

there were certain sugars or other types of carbon sources that

Rivetype O27 strains liked better than other C-deficile

strains and we stumbled upon this dicaccharide of glucose called Triolose and

so while we were testing this we found that the Rivetypo27 strains do much better on Trellos.

But what was more surprising is we found a second riba type,

...