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 Yacult.

This is Scientific Americans' 60-second science. I'm Karen Hopkin.

If you've ever checked out the restaurant reviews on Yelp, you know that these little missives

can tell you whether a bistro is overpriced or understaffed or just nothing to write home about.

But they may also be able to tell the local health department whether an establishment has

been serving up salmonella.

Researchers at Columbia University in New York City were looking into an outbreak of food poisoning at a local restaurant a few years ago when they got the idea of using social media to track gastrointestinal disturbances.

During the investigation, the Department of Health noted that patrons had reported their illnesses on Yelp and their reviews, but hadn't reported them the 311, the city's official reporting service.

Computer scientist Thomas Eflind, who led the study. Previous investigations had shown that monitoring social media for keywords associated with illness was a good way of rapidly

identifying outbreaks of infectious diseases, such as the flu.

So Eflind and his team built a similar system for stomach symptoms.

The Department of Health started using it in 2012.

The tool works by sifting through the recent Yelp reviews for New York City restaurants each day

to identify potential reports of food-borne illness.

Yelp reviews get scanned for telltale terms, such as vomit, diarrhea, food poisoning, and sick.

Flagged entries then get passed along to epidemiologists for a closer look.

The systems produce some false positives.

For example, from reviews that stated things like,

...