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.

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To learn more about Yachtolt, visit yacolp.co.

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.

Last week, tens of thousands of gallons of sewage gushed into urban streams in Baltimore,

because of leaky pipes and flooding rains.

And when that happens, it's not just organic matter and microbes that get flushed into aquatic habitats.

It's drug residues, too.

Caffeine, antihistamines,

headache drugs, even amphetamines and heroin. Researchers actually detected all those drugs a few years back in a survey of urban and suburban streams in Baltimore, and they wanted to see what

affect illegal drugs, like amphetamines, might have on aquatic ecosystems. So they built artificial

streams in the lab, stocked with insects and real creek rocks, slippery ones with biofilms of

algae and bacteria growing on them. Then they doped half the streams with amphetamine residues,

similar to the concentrations found in real urban streams. After three weeks, the mix of microbial

life in the amphetamine-laced streams changed significantly compared to the untainted waters,

and insects like midges emerged earlier than usual, suggesting that drug residues might be

able to alter food webs underwater and on land, too. The results appear in the journal Environmental Science and Technology.

Previous studies have shown that even treated sewage has lots of drug residues in it,

because most wastewater treatment plants weren't built to filter out pharmaceuticals.

One solution, the researchers say, is more up-to-date wastewater infrastructure.

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