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 Yachtold, visit yacult.co.

.jp. That's y-A-K-U-L-T.co.jp. When it comes to a guide for your gut, count on YACL.

This is Scientific American 60 Second Science.

I'm Emily Schwing.

The world may have just come to understand the nature of disease epidemics over the last year.

But for more than two decades, David Earn has been working on his own understanding of infectious diseases,

and he's using math to explain

it all. And I'm particularly interested in patterns of epidemics that have occurred in the past

and seeing what we can understand about disease spread in the past and hope to learn about disease

spread in the future from that. Earn is an applied mathematician at Ontario's McMaster University.

His research explores factors that contribute to how diseases spread among people.

And he's become an expert in tracking down the historic documents about long ago epidemics

that still hold mathematical clues we can learn from today.

Key to all this is his team's knack for digital sleuthing.

Early on in his career, Earn recognized that he could uncover numbers of deaths and their causes in Europe

by sifting through piles of old records.

They're called bills of mortality, and he's found thousands of them.

If we were to look over time, all of them, they were published weekly over hundreds of years,

we'd see a pattern, and that would be potentially very enlightening.

...