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.

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This is Scientific American's 60-second science. I'm Christopher in Taguata.

10,000 years ago, the Sahara had extensive grasslands and was dotted with lakes and trees.

But some 5,000 years ago, that green Sahara dried up to become the enormous desert we know today.

And scientists now think that this climate shift had effects far away,

including causing a megadr drought in Southeast Asia. Kathleen R. Johnson, a paleo-climatologist and

geochemist at the University of California Irvine, says the key to that discovery were stalagmites,

collected in a cave in northern Laos. So lagmites are really amazing archives of past climate variability.

People are often more familiar with things like tree rings or ice cores or maybe ocean

sediment cores.

Well, stalagmites work in a similar way in that they are deposited over time.

Johnson's team analyzed trace elements and carbon and oxygen isotopes in the hardened cave drippings.

That information enables researchers to determine rainfall patterns over the millennia.

And Johnson and her colleagues discovered signs of a thousand-year-long drought in Laos,

which began around the same time the Sahara dried up, about 5,000 years ago.

As for why the two events might be connected,

the researchers simulated the drying out of the Sahara using climate models,

and they included a couple things we know happened,

...