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.jp. When it comes to a guide for your gut, count on Yacult.

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

In the science fiction story, Dune, the desert planet Aracus is inhabited by enormous, fearsome sandworms.

Gods, what a monster.

They blast out of the dunes to swallow vehicles whole.

They also look sort of familiar to Caltech geneticist Paul Sternberg.

They look like nematodes. You know, anything in the popular culture that has

relationship to worms we follow. Nematodes, of course, are much smaller than sandworms.

Most nematodes you can just barely see. And they're a lot slower.

These worms would probably take 100 years to get across the U.S. if they could do it and they

went continuously day and night.

Even so, they're pretty scary when you look at them up close.

Sternberg and his colleagues had a hunch they might find nematodes lurking in one of California's

most extreme habitats, Mono Lake, on the east side of the Sierra Nevada. It's super salty, alkaline,

and loaded with arsenic, and previously known to harbor only

two animal species, brine shrimp and alkali flies. So the researchers took soil samples at beaches

around the lake, and indeed, they found eight species of nematodes living there.

So we just went from two animals to at least ten species. So that's what's kind of striking. So are they going

...