Race the rudder. Raise the sales. Raise the sales. Captain, an unidentified ship approaching. Over.

Roger that. Wait. Is that an enterprise sales solution? Reach sales professionals, not professional sailors. With LinkedIn ads, you can target the right people by industry, job title and more. Start converting your B2B audience high-quality leads today. Spent 200 euro on your first campaign and get a free 200-euro credit for the next one. Go to LinkedIn.com slash XXX to claim your offer. Terms and conditions apply. Welcome to Science Talk, the weekly podcast of Scientific American for the seven days starting May 2nd. I'm Steve Murski.

This week on the podcast, some small talk.

Very small talk.

We're going to talk about microbes.

Last Thursday and Friday, the American Museum of Natural History in New York sponsored a symposium called Small Matters, Microbes, and their role in conservation.

We have an interview with one of the keynote speakers, David Relman, who discussed all the little critters living on and inside us, and we'll have

short clips from two of the other keynote addresses by Princeton's Andrew Dobson and

former National Science Foundation Director Rita Caldwell. Plus, we'll test your knowledge

about some recent science in the news. First up, David Relman.

He came in from Stanford University, where he's an associate professor of microbiology and

immunology and an assistant professor of medicine in the division of infectious diseases.

The human body has about 10 trillion individual cells.

More remarkable, we're home to about 100 trillion microbial cells. I spoke to Dr.

Rellman after his talk, which was called, It's a Jungle in There, Microbial Diversity in the

Human Body. Dr. Rellman, great to talk to you today. It's a pleasure talking to you.

It's really quite amazing. We're one-tenth us.

Talk about that a little bit.

Well, it's been known for some time that we carry with us a huge consortium of microbial life.

We're still confronting this very dramatic, simple fact that we are 10 parts microbe and one part human,

if you simply count the number of cells within the human body.

And those raw numbers are 10 to the 13th human cells

...