Welcome to the Quanta Science podcast.

Each episode we bring you stories about developments in science and mathematics.

I'm Susan Vallage.

Sitting alongside the neurons in your enteric nervous system are underappreciated glial cells.

They play key roles in digestion and disease that scientists are only

just starting to understand. That's next.

It's season three of the joy of why, and I still have a lot of questions. Like, what is this

thing we call time? Why does altruism exist? And where is

Jan 11? I'm here. Astrophysicist and co-host. Ready for anything. That's right. I'm bringing in

the A team. So brace yourselves. Get ready to learn. I'm Janelleleven. I'm Steve Strogatz.

And this is Quantum Magazine's podcast, The Joy of Why.

New episodes drop every other Thursday.

From the moment you swallow a bite of food to the moment it exits your body, the gut is to

toiling to process this strange outside

material. It has to break down chunks into small bits. It must distinguish healthy nutrients

from toxins or pathogens and absorb only what is beneficial. And it does all of this while

moving the partially processed food one way

through different factories of digestion, from the mouth to the esophagus, to the stomach,

through the intestines, and out. Marissa Scabuzzo is a postdoctoral researcher at Case Western

Reserve University in Ohio.

Digestion is essential for life. It's just a really cool process, of course. It's really ordinary.

We do it every day. But also, if you really think about it, like, it sounds very forward and alien.

...