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.

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

This is Scientific Americans' 60-second Science. I'm Jason Goldman.

Epidemiologists have long known that socially connected individuals, like friends, family, and

coworkers, are more likely to transmit pathogens to each other. But when an individual becomes

obviously ill, their social connections become temporarily reduced.

When we feel sick, we tend to stay away from others. And when we appear sick, others tend to stay away

from us. That distancing usually helps to slow down the spread of a pathogen. But not all social

relationships work the same way. Parents of sick

children will continue to care for those children at the risk of their own health, and that

devotion is true beyond humans. Consider vampire bats. They usually groom their own offspring as well as other bats, and they share food, but illness

changes some of those activities. To track illness and behavior in a vampire bat community,

researchers injected some bats with a substance that triggered their immune systems.

The bats felt less well than usual without actually suffering from

a disease. In this situation, unrelated bats stopped grooming each other, but mothers continued

to care for their offspring, even if one of them seemed to be infected.

In these changes in grooming, there was a difference between unrelated bats and maternal relationships.

So what it looked like was that sick moms kept grooming their offspring and healthy moms

maintain grooming their sick offspring.

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