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.

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

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

Tens of trillions of microbes call our living bodies home. But when we die...

The first thing that happens is basically ecosystem collapse, where you have a tremendous loss of diversity.

Nathan Lentz, a molecular biologist at John J. College in New York.

And then it bottoms out and then starts to get rich again. That microbial phoenix, rising up from our

extinguished mortal coils, it's called the necrobium. And Lentz and his team tracked the necrobium

by swabbing the ears and noses of 21 cadavers at a body farm in Tennessee.

Body farm is sort of an outdoor lab for forensic scientists, where bodies are left to the elements to decompose.

They tracked the genetic signatures of that microbial community as it waned and waxed after death.

And they used that data to build an algorithm that

could pinpoint a corpse's time of death to an accuracy of just two summertime days.

And that held out for up to sort of six, seven weeks, and that's way better than entomology can give you.

Entomology being the study of insects. In this case, insects that colonize a corpse.

Entomology is okay for giving you upper and lower limits, you know, within five to seven days,

but beyond that, entomology is not helpful. The studies in the journal, Plus One. Now, the method

isn't quite ready for prime time. There's still a lot of biological noise in the system. We're talking about living things here. Well, living and dead things.

But as with any machine learning, more info will help it see beyond the noise.

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